Holden

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter’s name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was /aha/; this became /aka/ in Latin, passed into English via Old French /atʃ/, and by Middle English was pronounced /aːtʃ/. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic.

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled aitch[1] or occasionally eitch. Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and hence a spelling of haitch is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of [[Hiberno-English][2] and other varieties of English, such as those of Malaysia and Singapore. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch.[3] In Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching.[4] The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example “an HTML page” or “a HTML page”. The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.[5]

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, but almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F, before losing it again, and now has developed an [h] allophone of /x/ in some Spanish-speaking countries. H is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English /tʃ/, French and Portuguese /ʃ/ from /tʃ/, Italian /k/, German /χ/, Czech and Slovak /x/.

The Semitic letter ח (ḥêṯ) most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA: [ħ]). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on, this letter, eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, /ɛː/. In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where Middle English ea /ɛː/ and ee /eː/ came to be both pronounced /iː/.

H is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English is aitch^[1] (pronounced /eɪtʃ/), though it is also pronounced haitch /heɪtʃ/ in some dialects.