Saying haitch.

[Chunkymenrock]

I almost never hear anyone saying aitch anymore. It's so infuriating! There is no such word as haitch. Am I alone in feeling so irritated? 😕

It isn’t snobbery. It’s correct pronunciation. You’d correct a child who said pacific instead of specific, you’d correct a child who used brought where they ought to have used bought, correcting a child who says haitch is exactly the same thing

@HasaDigaEebowai

It isn’t snobbery. It’s correct pronunciation. You’d correct a child who said pacific instead of specific, you’d correct a child who used brought where they ought to have used bought, correcting a child who says haitch is exactly the same thing

Well, no. Because "pacific" for "specific" is wrong. (Though it's a natural stage in a child's L1 acquisition as they get to grips with the fun that is the English consonant cluster- /s/+/p/ in head position in a syllable being particularly difficult due to the oral gymnastics the mouth has to do to articulate them together. (It's why Spanish expedites the issue by adding an /e/)

Haitch, as has been explained a multitude of times, is a perfectly acceptable variant.

@HasaDigaEebowai

It isn’t snobbery. It’s correct pronunciation. You’d correct a child who said pacific instead of specific, you’d correct a child who used brought where they ought to have used bought, correcting a child who says haitch is exactly the same thing

Is your reading comprehension unusually poor?

@HasaDigaEebowai

You're really not getting it.

As Geamhradh says, it's simply a variant.

Just like Americans aren't wrong for pronouncing 'tom-ay-to' instead of 'tom-ah-to'.

I have two English degrees and I say haitch.

Don't be ridiculous Voyage, they can't be degrees in actual English. Must be some other language that sounds strangely like it. I'd ask for my money back if I were you.

Is your reading comprehension unusually poor?

Clearly. I'm out. Have enough to do without debating points with people who act like twats and are rude for no reason.

@HasaDigaEebowai

Is your reading comprehension unusually poor?

Clearly. I'm out. Have enough to do without debating points with people who act like twats and are rude for no reason.

But if you have read the thread, you will see a lot of evidence that ‘haitch’ is an acknowledged variant, not, as you are mischaracterising it, akin to a child’s mispronunciation. Hence my question.

@HasaDigaEebowai

Is your reading comprehension unusually poor?

Clearly. I'm out. Have enough to do without debating points with people who act like twats and are rude for no reason.

Said the person managing to offend about half of the English speaking world AND being wrong in the bargain.

@HasaDigaEebowai

Is your reading comprehension unusually poor?

Clearly. I'm out. Have enough to do without debating points with people who act like twats and are rude for no reason.

The only that here I see are the ones looking down on others for using a perfectly acceptable pronounciation.

If half the world is right for saying haitch because it’s an acceptable pronunciation of the word aitch then the other half must also be right for using the pronunciation aitch. As such my point that it isn’t snobbery is legitimate.

In my view it isn’t snobbery, its something I’d correct in my child’s pronunciation. But I don’t care enough about it to engage if there’s gonna to be a pile on. I didn’t read the whole thread. People are free to make whatever points they want in a debate I thought without having personal insults about their reading comprehension thrown in.

But crack on. It seems to be the way of mn at the moment. In the past two days I’ve been thick, old and now I have poor reading comprehension. Whatever.

No one has said that aitch is incorrect. No one.

If half the world is right for saying haitch because it’s an acceptable pronunciation of the word aitch then the other half must also be right for using the pronunciation aitch.

That's exactly the point. Both are acceptable.

It's a bit silly to get in a strop. If you claim someone is doing something wrong when they're not, you're going to get push back.

If half the world is right for saying haitch because it’s an acceptable pronunciation of the word aitch then the other half must also be right for using the pronunciation aitch.

Yes, you’ve got it. Neither is incorrect.

As such my point that it isn’t snobbery is legitimate.

The snobbery is from characterising one of those accepted pronunciations as a mispronunciation from a sense that one accent or dialect is superior to another.

In my view it isn’t snobbery, its something I’d correct in my child’s pronunciation.

You want your own kid to share your accent and dialect, that’s pretty normal. Saying that one should correct it in a child’s pronunciation as one would easily confused words like bought and brought that is problematic and, yes, a wee bit snobbish.

@HasaDigaEebowai

It isn’t snobbery. It’s correct pronunciation. You’d correct a child who said pacific instead of specific, you’d correct a child who used brought where they ought to have used bought, correcting a child who says haitch is exactly the same thing

It’s not incorrect. It’s regional.

It is most definitely not incorrect. In Northern Ireland it used to be one of the ways to tell Protestants from Catholics- although I think less do now. It is a completely acceptable pronunciation and to correct someone for saying haitch is wrong, and possibly sectarian.

I’m Scottish, from the highlands English mother though. I say haitch. Although I rarely say it. I can read and spell and it hasn’t hindered me too much in life so far, and no one has ever commented that it’s incorrect.

I use it if I’m spelling something out, I don’t even know how my kids say it, will ask them later and they’ll think I’ve lost my mind.

I think there are a number of issues being conflated here:
1 Are there other variants of English other than RP within which haitch is acceptable
2 Within RP is haitch acceptable
3 is it snobbish to expect Englis television journalists to use RP
4 is it snobbish to want your children to speak RP or even just to avoid certain non-RP pronunciations whilst accepting others.
I would say yes to 1 and no to 4.
On 2 and 3, the expression ‘pissing into the wind’ comes to mind, but snobbery doesn’t necessarily come into it, although it may in certain cases.

Not to mention:

1. Is it acceptable to regard RP as the default rather than just one of many versions of English spoken around the world.

@MindyStClaire
Ok. That should have been 1 and 2 should have been: Is haitch acceptable in some of those versions.

Ahhh but mentioning RP brings up a whole new argument we can discuss nicely (most of us- and can I say that this thread has been rather lovely, and almost as PC used to be in discussing the quirks as opposed to "point at the thicko" with which we've been a bit inundated over recent years )
Very very few people use RP these days. And the number is ever dwindling. Often we think "posh" or "upper-class" = RP but it doesn't anymore. I think it will die out as a term, as it's dying out as a concept.
Offhand- Joanna Lumley. Yes. Prince William- no. Boris Johnson- yes, but only about 20 years ago when he wasn't putting on the piffle-waffle thing.
The Queen herself very interesting. Listen to her in the 1950s through to the present and you'll hear she's undergone an almost Jamie Oliver style dumbing-down. (In the early River Cafe shows, for those old enough to remember, he did NOT speak Mockney at all.)

I do love words and voices.

@Geamhradh

Yes. I watch an awful lot of B&W films, and people really do not speak like that anymore.

Same in America. You just don't hear those clipped voices like Bette Davis, whose accent was barely distinguishable as American. Seems to have disappeared completely.

We need a new term, don’t we, that isn’t as loaded as ‘BBC English’? Something like General American English.

I mean they weren't from a Russell Group university so they aren't mumsnet approved

Argh quote fail! That was in reply to @MindyStClaire