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by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

Drublic

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What is the origin of upper and lower case H (Hh) in the English language?

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  • by canadianhelper on February 13th, 2007

    canadianhelper

    The Semitic letter ? (?ê?) probably represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA /?/). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence. The early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on, this letter, eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, /??/. (In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where EA /??/ and EE /e?/ came to be both pronounced /i:/.)

    Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, but all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F, then lost it again, and Castilian /x/ has developed an [h] allophone in some Spanish-speaking countries. In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as the phoneme /h/. This may be because /h/ was sometimes lost between vowels in German, but it may also have to do with the fact that Romance lost /h/. Hence, H is used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English /t?/, French /?/ from /t?/, Italian /k/, German /χ/.

    source: Wiki
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H

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