The fatal letter
The near-death and resurrection of “h”
Has ever a letter been imbued with such significance as the humble h?
If you’ve seen the musical My Fair Lady — or read Pygmalion, the Shaw play it’s based on — you’ll know what I mean.
In both versions, our heroine, Eliza Doolittle, is a Cockney flower girl. Her opposite is Professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician who bets that he can pass Eliza off as a duchess simply by changing the way she speaks.
In order to achieve such a transformation, one of Henry’s most important tasks is to address Eliza’s complete lack of h-sounds. Eliza’s h-lessness is a major mark of her humble origins: they out her as a street merchant, rather than an heiress.
In the musical adaptation, the issue of h is even more prominent, using a song to dramatize the moment when Eliza finally acquires the upper-class accent Henry has been trying to instill in her.
The song is one of the most famous from the musical: The Rain in Spain. The lyrics consist mainly of phonetics drills, one of which shows that Eliza can now pronounce the h-sound:
HENRY: In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire…
ELIZA: …hurricanes hardly happen.
If you grew up in North America, where h-dropping is rare in most regions, My Fair Lady may have been your only encounter with this anxiety over h-dropping. But in England the pronunciation of your “aitches” was, and still is, a major social signal.1
And then there are the words that flip the association between h and “correct speech”: pronouncing the h in heir, hour, and honour shows that you’ve only ever seen the word written.
And no one would judge you for an honest day’s work — there, the use of an, rather than a, shows that the h of honest is silent. If anything, you’d get strange looks if you said a honest day’s work.
Some words are still live battlegrounds: is it an herb or a herb? a historic or an historic?
It’s small consolation, then, that the seeds of all this confusion and controversy were planted many centuries ago.
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The h-sound is an ancient inheritance dating back to before English was even English. But the story of h-dropping is not as simple as the loss of that inheritance.
The h-sound has never been a normal part of English: it has been pronounced weakly, and inconsistently, throughout the entire history of the language.
That inconsistency shows up in unexpected ways. For example, many words which have an h today — at least, in the standard forms of English — got it only recently: words like humble, humour, and hospital were once said without the h-sounds they have today. And they were h-less in the mouths of all English speakers, regardless of their social standing.2
So why all this fuss over h in particular?
The answer begins long before English was English, and ends much more recently than you might imagine.
