Talk:Phonological history of English fricatives and affricates

Historic herb h-dropping
Hi Angr, can you please elucidate why you reverted my addition? The words "herb' and "historic" are commonly pronounced without h, as can be seen from combinations "an herb" and "an historic ..." that are in the majority for these words. &minus;Woodstone 08:14, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)


 * I didn't remove what you said, I simply moved it to the last paragraph of the page. The h-less pronunciations of "herb" and "historic" are the older ones; they're not due to h-dropping in English (they're due to h-dropping in Vulgar Latin). The h-ful pronunciations of the words are much later spelling pronunciations. They contrast with h-less pronunciations of "house" and "hundred", which are due to h-dropping in English, because in those words the h-ful pronunciations are older. --Angr 09:23, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry! I didn't see the corrected lines a the bottom. &minus;Woodstone 12:09, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)

I have Portuguese as my mother tongue and am fluent in English. I've noticed that other people who have minimal knowledge of English tend to add /h/ in places where it doesn't belong, probably due to influence from other words... thought it might be relevant to this article. -Cctoide 14:18, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

In British English, "herb" and "history" are not normally pronounced without the /h/ &mdash; the former never (in educated English), the latter only when preceded by the indefinite article, and then only by some people (I'd say a large minority, but I'm not certain). So it's " a herb garden", but it can be either an historian" or "a historian". --Mel Etitis  ( Μελ Ετητης ) 16:53, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

h-adding: a request
I want someone with a decent sense of the ironic to give us a nice way of pointing out that if people frequently add an 'h' to the word aitch, resulting in naming the letter haitch. It tickles me. :D Wooster (talk) 13:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Haitch is the normal pronunciation of the letter H in Ireland. —Angr 14:07, 9 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Not by most educated people (the same being true of the English, of course). --Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης ) 15:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Really? Every Irish person I've met (who I've heard pronounce the name of the letter) has called it haitch regardless of their level of education. John C. Wells in Accents of English reports it to be a shibboleth in the North, where Protestants call it aitch and Catholics haitch. —Angr 16:20, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's true that I've not often called upon friends, family, and colleagues to say it, but I've certainly heard educated Irish people say "aitch" not "haitch". My immediate family (on the Irish side) were all brought up in England, so they're no help, but I know at least one Catholic Ulsterman who says "aitch" (a Professor of Law), and a number of people from the South who say it too (mainly psychologists, philosophers, and academics in related fields). Next time I'm in College I'll try subtly to ask people to spell technical terms in their disciplines, and see what I find... --Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης ) 16:49, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
 * It may be one of those things Irish people living in England drop, though, after getting teased about it a few times. (The way Canadians in the U.S. quickly learn to call Z "zee" if they don't want to be giggled at.) —Angr 18:16, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
 * True enough. --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 15:03, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Gosh, well I didn't expect a debate. The article on h does say that it's generally considered standard to say aitch, although obviously usage differs and Ireland and Australia differ more than most (ahem). Still, I can't think of a clever enough way of explaining it while getting at the irony in a way which will avoid BJAODN or reverts. Wooster (talk) 15:00, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, maybe my experiences in linguistics have made me jaded, but I just don't see anything ironic or amusing about it. It's perfectly natural to want the name of a letter to contain the sound most closely associated with that letter (the only other letters whose names don't are Q and Y). I'm actually a little surprised no dialect of English (AFAIK) calls it "hay" or "hee". I do think, however, that discussion of the names of the letter H would be more appropriate in the article H than here. —Angr 21:40, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
 * My mistake; I must be working in an alternative reality where even perfectly natural human behaviour can still be amusing (I like the quote on your user page about "foolish consistency", by the way). Still and all, hyper-correcting aitch to haitch (which is what it is in any setting where aitch is standard) would seem to me to be an eminently appropriate example to work with; excluding My Fair Lady's classic treatment, of course.  By the way, in my childhood at least, the "baby name" for h was  ('scuse my inability with IPA symbols and mark-up).  So it was, and probably still is, in a dialect which dies out when we go to school.  :)  Wooster (talk) 21:24, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

W? (Y does &mdash; at least in its vowel usage). --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 23:20, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
 * What do you mean W? That's pronounced, isn't it? :p —Angr 23:50, 10 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Good point... --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 09:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

s pronounced as sh after r
Could someone add some information about this topic? I am not a native speaker of English, but I heard this several times. I'm curious because it also happens in other languages (e.g. Norwegian) and I can't imagine what kind of strange pronunciation of "r" can make it impossible to pronounce the following "s". Example: (listen to both clips and notice how "first" and "years" are pronounced). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.177.44.75 (talk) 19:57, 15 March 2007 (UTC).


 * This is an influence from the Irish (and isn't only after "r"). --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 20:36, 15 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I could only hear it after "r"s in the clip. Could you give some other examples (or point me to any sources on the net)? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.177.44.205 (talk) 17:48, 16 March 2007 (UTC).

Sorry &mdash; I could only advise you to listen to lots of Irish accents... (Remember to sign your messages with four tildes ( ~ ) by the way.) --Mel Etitis  ( Talk ) 17:56, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Historical h-dropping and h-adding
The impression I get is that (at least in the dialect of London, and possibly in other regions) by the 16th century, /h/ had completely disappeared as a phoneme in Early Modern English, and that it was (sometimes, often, or perhaps generally, depending on idiolect) phonetically redundantly added to the beginning of vowel-initial words (or perhaps entire prosodic units?) if the initial syllable was stressed (for reasons of hypercorrection or who knows what), or to strongly emphasised words (comparable to how strongly emphasised words may be pronounced with a rolled [r] in some – old-fashioned? – lects or pronunciations, such as on the stage, or while holding a speech). Therefore, the grapheme h lost any connection to the sound [h]. (This state of affairs, or a similar one, seems to have persisted for centuries longer even in the standard language, or at least in some varieties accepted as standard, and in dialects until the present – some creole varieties, such as the eastern varieties of Jamaican Patois, where the [h] is non-phonemic and in "free" variation, seem to presuppose the same pronunciation.) Clearly, that is what David Crystal's work on the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time implies, allowing puns which require, for example, that hour was pronounced identical to whore – and moreover without [h] (in his pronunciation), though when I asked him directly if that means that [h] was generally silent at the time he seemed unwilling to affirm that roundly. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:43, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

H-dropping as separate article
It seems to me that the section on H-dropping (and that on H-adding, which rather duplicates part of the former section) could be split out into a separate article, particularly as it includes information about languages other than English. Any thoughts? W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:20, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I'll do this, then, if there are no objections. Also, once this is done, I think we can pretty much merge this page back into Phonological history of English consonants, to simplify the arrangement of these articles, which have a lot of duplication. It would really only involve adding back a few additional details on things like the taught-taut merger to the latter article. W. P. Uzer (talk) 07:42, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I support this. Actually I'm surprised it doesn't have a separate article yet. Peter238 (talk) 07:45, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I've now ensured that all the information that appears on this page also appears in the Phonological history of English consonants section. That section also now contains additional information and better sourcing. Much of the detail is to be found in dedicated articles (like the H-dropping one that we created recently, and others about TH realizations), and in Middle English phonology. I therefore believe that this article is now redundant, and inferior to the aforementioned section. Can we thus replace it with a redirect to that section? W. P. Uzer (talk) 09:30, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Since no-one objects, I've done this. W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:28, 12 October 2015 (UTC)