156 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



[May 2, 1887. 



THE LETTER "H" IN ENGLAND. 



LETTER recently appeared in the ]^ew 

 York Tribune of September 27 on the use 

 and misuse of the letter "h" in England, 

 ill which some very absurd mistakes were 

 made. This is a subject of much greater 

 difficulty and complexity than many ima- 

 gine. During my lecture-travels in Eng- 

 land 1 have made many inquiiies into the 

 diversities of usage in regard to the letter " h " in different 

 parts of the old country, and into the changes which have 

 been noticed by provincial families during the last forty or 

 fifty years. The results have been rather curious and some- 

 what difficult to interpret. They tend, however, to show- 

 that the habit of dropping the " h " has spread from the 

 large towns— as if it was a habit resulting from that 

 slurring of speech which is apt to occur wliere men 

 are always busily at work. In dull and quiet places, 

 " far from the madding crowd," re.sistante against the 

 slui-rinc of the " h " has continued longer. In fact it 

 was not until the rapid extension of railway communica- 

 tion, in the years 1835 to 1845, that the provinces were 

 overspread by the careless way of using the " h," which 

 had long prevailed in the metropolis and around busy 

 centres. 



The use of an aspirate where no aspirate should be is a 

 fault which, though now nearly as widespread as the 

 dropping of the " h," is of later origin. It arose appai-ently 

 from the felt necessity for some strengthening of the 

 language (enervated by lost aspirates) when emphasis was 

 reipiired. It is commonly supposed, especially in Americii, 

 that among the ill-cultured in England the '• h " is habitu- 

 ally drop]5ed where it should be used, and thrown in where 

 it has no business. But this is a mistake. When in an 

 American new.spaper "han Henglishman his made to 

 hex-haspirate 'is haitches " after that fashion, every English- 

 man recognises the incorrectness of the cai-icature. In the 

 well-known comment by a veterinary surgeon, in one of 

 Leech's pictures, " It ayn't the 'unting iis 'urts 'im, it's the 

 'ammer, 'ammer, 'ammer along the 'ard 'igh road," there is 

 not one word, except perhaps -'ayn't," which, according even 

 to the worst Cockney dialect, will bear the extra or exaspirated 

 " h." An average reporter in an American pajier would 

 certainly write the sentence, " Hit hayn't the 'unting has 

 'urts 'im, hit's the 'ammer, 'ammer, 'ammer halong the 'ard 

 'igh road," which would be quite wrong. It will be news 

 to many (especially in America^ I suspect, but it is the 

 simple fact, that the exaspirated " h " is not only limited in 

 its use, but is often recognised in a word which requires au 

 aspii-ate. Nay, one can recognise one wliose aspirations are 

 a i-ecent iind, as it were, artificial de\elopment by the way 

 in which he aspii'ates the "h" in such words as "house" 

 and " horse." I have a friend, a well-re;id man, unfortu- 

 nately sent by his fivther to schools where it was not thought 

 worth while to be strict about the '" h's," wlio avoids the 

 use of the " h " in words where he knows it should be used, 

 because he is conscious that an exiispii-at^d " h " where an 

 '' h " is needed sounds worse to practised ears than an '' h " 

 dropped altogether. When a friend asks him why he does 

 not a.spirate his " h's," knowing, as he does well, where they 

 are wanted, he will say, " Oh, h-h-hang your aitches ! " in a 

 way showing that it is not for want of aspirational power 

 that he drops them. •. - . 



The writer in the Xev^ York IVibmte makes the pre- 

 posterous statement that the Englishman of the upper ten 

 thousand objects to the correct use of the letter " h " by 

 servants and small tradesmen. There may be occasional 



snobs who express such a feeling, though I have never come 

 across any ; but such cases must be altogether exceptional. 

 So far from having any feeling of this sort, an English man 

 or woman of the so-called upper cla.ss will often show undue 

 condescension for those who blunder over theii' " h's " by 

 correcting mistakes somewhat too pointedly. I know that 

 many of the kindlier sort — the really better sort in the 

 so-called upper classes — are often divided in their mind 

 between their fear of offending servants by correcting wrong 

 "h's " and the wish to set them right. Some of the less- 

 cultured are very touchy about such correction ; others have 

 sense enough to invite it. 



The same writer, whose letter was in fact a congeries of 

 blunders, dwells on the entii-ely correct use of the " h " in 

 England among the well-educated classes. But in England 

 our "whys" and " whens," our " whiches," " wheres," 

 and '• whethers," are much too apt to be confounded with 

 " wise " and " wens," with " witches," " wares," and 

 " wethers." So widely is the fault spread that many of our 

 educational authorities insist on " w" for " wh " as correct. 

 A generation or so ago this was not the case, and a well- 

 educated man would as soon have said " Yot's o'clock " as 

 " Wot's o'clock." In America, caieful though Americans 

 are about the letter " h," the distinction between " rhyme " 

 and " rime," " Rhode " (Island) and " road " is not so con- 

 stantly attended to as I had expected. 



Throughout the whole English-speaking community the 

 original sound of " h " after " t " and " d," has long since 

 been lost. As the very existence of the two sounds we now 

 represent by " th " serves to show us, there is no connection 

 whatever between the sound of " th " in " thought " or in 

 " that " and an aspirated dental. I should have mentioned 

 Ireland, however, as an exception, for there we still hear 

 the old sounds in " d'his and d'hat," "t'ought" and 

 " t'ousand." 



I am satisfied the aspirate originally had a guttural sound 

 in the English, as probably in other languages — at least in 

 many words. Otherwise we should not find " horn " and 

 " corn " associated in English (or " horn " representing 

 " cornu ") any more than we should find the Latin " hortus " 

 related to the Greek " chortos " on the one hand, and our 

 own " garden " on the other. What was the sound which the 

 Anglo-Saxons represented by the spelling " hwat " 1 I 

 fancv it was a sound such as we still heai- in parts of 

 Ireland, where in sharp or ejaculatory inquiiy the word 

 " what 1 '' sounds almost like " quhat." It is well known 

 that in old Scottish our " wh ' is nearly always written 

 "quli." Again, the undoubted guttural in the old sounding 

 of " light," " sight,' itc, was represented in Anglo-Saxon 

 by the letter "h" alone, in the strange spelling, "liht," 

 " siht," ic. 



STUDIES WITH A SMALL TELESCOPE.* 



i does not seem to us just that this admii-able 

 little treatise should be left unnoticed in these 

 columns merely because the greater portion of 

 the matter first appeared in Knowledge. Even 

 if the plan and scope of the treatise had been 

 suggested by the editor of Knowledge, there 

 would still be i-oom for remarks on the way in 

 which the work has been done. But as a matter of fact, 

 the plan of the work was as entirely Captain Xoble's as the 

 execution has been. 



We regard this book as one of the best introductions to 



* " Half-hours with a 3-inch Telescope." By Captain AV. Noble, 

 F.R.A.S. LoDgmans & Co. : London. 



