Holden

In Italian H has no real phonological value. It is rather a diacritic grapheme. The most

important uses are to differentiate certain short words, for example some present tense

forms of the verb avere “tohave” (hanno = they have, whereas anno = year), in short

interjections (oh, ehi), and in the digraphs ch/k/ and gh /ɡ/. Some languages, including

English, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Finnish, use H as abreathy voiced glottal fricative

[ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment. In Ukrainian

and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, H is also commonlyused for /ɦ/,

normally written with the Cyrillic letter Г. (Note the difference from Russian pronunciation

and romanisation.) In Irish H after a consonant indicates lenition of that consonant; it is

known as a séimhiú.

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).

I n S p a n i s h a n d P o r t u g u e s e H i s a s i l e n t l e t t e r w i t h n o p r o n u n c i a t i o n , a s i n h i j o [ ˈ i x o ] ( ‘ s o n ‘ ) , h o l a [ ˈ o l a ] ( ‘ h e l l o ‘ ) , a n d h o j e [ ô . j e ] ( ‘ t o d a y ‘ ) . T h e s p e l l i n g r e f l e c t s a n e a r l i e r p r o n u n c i a t i o n o f t h e s o u n d [ h ] . T h e [ h ] s o u n d e x i s t s i n a n u m b e r o f d i a l e c t s i n S p a n i s h , e i t h e r a s a s y l l a b l e – f i n a l a l l o p h o n e o f / s / ( f o r e x a m p l e A n d a l u s i a ,  A r g e n t i n a o r C u b a – v g . e s t o [ ˈ e h t̪ o ] ” t h i s ” , o r a s a d i a l e c t a l r e a l i z a t i o n o f S t a n d a r d / x / ( f o r e x a m p l e M e x i c a n c a j a [ ˈ k a h a ] ” b o x ” ) . T h e l e t t e r H a l s o a p p e a r s i n t h e d i g r a p h c h , p r o n o u n c e d / t ʃ / i n S p a n i s h and / ʃ / i n P o r t u g u e s e .

In English, H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value /h/ or silent) and in various digraphs, such as ch (/tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), gh (silent, /ɡ/, or /f/) , ph (/f/), rh (/r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (/θ/ or /ð/), wh (/w/, /hw/).H is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed. H is often silent in the weak form of some function words beginning with H, including had, has, have, he, her, him, his; and in some words of Romance origin and, for some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as in “an historic occasion”, “an hotel”.

In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen “heighten”, only the first <h> represents /h/. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent <h> in nearly all instances of <th> in native German words such as thun “to do” or Thür “door”. It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater “theater” and Thron “throne”, which continue to be spelled with <th> even after the last German spelling reform.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, variations of the letter are used to represent two sounds.

The lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative or ‘aspirate’, and the small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.

‘Hell in the sky’, 1950’s – Craggy action sans outline drop shadow

British Airports specifications document for Rail Alphabet, on of two such surviving sheets made for sign manufacturers. Design: Kinneir Calvert, late 1960s. Henrik Kubel used this in 2005 to begin the digitisation process for what became Britanica.