In the French language, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/. The French language classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways that must be learned to use French properly, even though it is a silent letter either way. The h muet, or “mute h“, is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so for example the singular definite article le or la is elided to l’. For example, le + hébergement becomes l’hébergement ”the accommodation”. The other kind of h is called h aspiré (“aspirated h“, though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and is treated as a phantom consonant. For example in le homard (“the lobster”) the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an h muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an h was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters V and U: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).