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? 😕

@LizzieAnt

“RunningStrong
I live in a world where Haitch is used more than Aitch, but even for me N Haitch S is quite difficult to say?
I suppose it's just what you're accustomed to hearing?

I live in a place (Ireland) where haitch is always said. I say N haitch S, and have never even considered an alternative pronunciation. But then I mostly see NHS written, I hear it spoken much more rarely (it's the HSE here).”

I’m not sure whether it’s because that’s what we keep hearing or just that most of us English drop more aitches than we realise. I’m pretty sure I don’t drop aitches if it involves pronouncing an extra letter as in ‘an ‘undred and one’, or Wolver’ampton with the ‘r’ and not the ‘h’. Beyond that, I’m not sure.

@butterpuffed
Shouldn’t that be:
A horror story but an horrific time?

I had an English teacher with a bee in her bonnet about how we should all say an ‘Otel’. It was ridiculous. She spoke like the rest of us in all other respects. In fact, she didn’t even use standard grammar. Her favourite expression was ‘I aren’t too keen on all this chat’.

I did actually hesitate when I typed 'A horrific time' , as I've seen 'an' written before . Never heard it spoken though !

The more I look at our language , the more complicated it becomes , but it's interesting !

I would say "a horrific time"

Mind you, I'd say an honest man.

Iirc there are a handful of words with a definite silent /h/
Hour
Honest
Heir
Honour etc

While "hotel" can be both a silent /h/ or a pronounced one. (I wonder if the Queen still says "an otel")

I'd not thought about "horrific", but realise, that, yes, I think I might naturally say "an"
A quick Google pulls this up:

www.quora.com/Why-do-BBC-presenters-now-say-the-awkward-an-horrific-accident-rather-than-a-horrific-accident-Previously-an-before-h-was-only-appropriate-before-a-silent-h-or-for-very-formal-affected-written-prose

...which if nothing else has given me the verb "octuple down" which I'm going to start using constantly Fabulous!

May I add to the trickiness of the letter h by mentioning the whole matter of aspiration? Massive generalisation coming up, but I think most English people pronounce words beginning with “wh” as if they begin with “w”. So “where” sounds very like “wear”. In Scotland and elsewhere the “wh” sound is aspirated so it sounds more breathy.
A language lecturer at my old university pointed out that in that pronunciation people are actually saying “hw” not “wh”. The breath comes before the w. He also said he had once spent a fruitless hour trying to convince a student of this, who refused to believe it.
So, to say “where” -
English say “wear”
Scottish say “hwere”.
What a pesky letter it is indeed!!

Yes, @Jacopo. I also think we English actually aspirate some other letters more than a lot of Scots. I’m thinking of ‘t’ particularly.
Fred Dibnah seemed to pronounce the W in whole, which I’ve never heard from anyone else. His voice was really interesting.

@Jacopo - Scottish say “hwere”.

I've just said where about 10 times and I can confirm that Irish people also say hwere. Every day's a school day.

It's haitch where I from, Manchester.

Can we move in to fighting about ‘sixth’ vs ‘sickth’ now?

@OchonAgusOchonOh
I would say “‘a horrific time”

I think I would have said that until fairly recently. It’s not even one of the obscure things I found out when teaching English circa 1990. It seems that later than that, broadcasters revived an obscure rule and suddenly I started hearing ‘an historic’ all over the place. I think I’ve adopted it but I may not be entirely consistent.

Annoys me, but I am a pedant! Nowhere near as much as jalla-peeno or fa-heetas.

@TheBraveLittleTailor yes Fred Dibnah’s voice was very memorable- I can hear him in my head exclaiming “Did yer like that?!” whenever he brought down some massive chimney.

@MusicTeacherSussex

Annoys me, but I am a pedant! Nowhere near as much as jalla-peeno or fa-heetas.

But those are mispronunciations. ‘Haitch’ is correct in Hiberno-English, for instance.

I can't believe this! English is not my first language and I've always said aitch, never noticing a different pronunciation.

The other day a client corrected my "aitch" with "hatch" and I felt crap for not pronouncing it right! Since then I've tried to force myself to say "hatch"!!!

"Haitch" not "hatch"
That's autocorrect, not me!

Irish family - should by rights say haitch. Mother protestant. Hence aitch I guess 🤷‍♀️

Didn't hear haitch til high school (Bedfordshire) and by then had it instilled in me that it was a mispronounciation. I'm not saying it's wrong... but it definitely is annoying!

How is it clear that it’s unexamined?
Take this thread for instance...

Power remains where it is however much we examine it.
Yes, but if we examine what we are saying we find out that we are basing opinions on assumptions that are not necessarily true. Then, lesson learned, we stop assuming that SE England is the centre of the universe.

@ListeriaWane

There is no such word as haitch

There’s also so such word as “aitch”. Or “eff”, or “double-you”, or “zed”, for that matter.

Aitch is in the dictionary dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/aitch

@Yogsgirl

How is aitch even a word? It's surely not- so how can there be debate about how to spell it? It's just a spoken form of the letter h.

How on earth do you ever need to write it- we never write other letter names as words, for example we never have any need to write eff or ell? Stupid argument!

It's defined in the dictionary... you'll find it under "A" rather than "H" though!

@Bananarama101

I don't really get the whole 'I was taught this at school, and was grew up with it, so my version is clearly correct' set in stone viewpoint. Things change over time, and I doubt anyone is getting confused over what letter you are talking about whichever way it's pronounced. I mean, you would also have been taught there are nine planets in the solar system, and any text book would have said so too. This was 'correct', but things move on, and it's not so now really.

If someone wanted to find the 8th letter of the alphabet in the English dictionary, would you suggest they start looking in the "A" or "H" section?!

@QuornStarMartini

Keeps me awake at night, I haven’t thought of anything else for years.

It was particularly tough dealing with Line of Duty and all the hype surrounding it. I coped and feel stronger for it.

😂😂😂

@MusicTeacherSussex
What’s wrong with ‘fa-heetas’? Too Spanish or not Spanish enough?

@Ajl46 I imagine the fact it does have a written form of the letter unlike anything else (except Z depending on your view on that...) is more of a linguistic anachronism than of any actual use. If you wanted to look up any other word in the dictionary beginning with H then you wouldn't start in the A section. In virtually any context it's of no use at all, and if you wanted to express the letter H in any written form, you would just write H, like anything else.

It doesn't bother me how it's pronounced, there are far more annoying issues of poor spelling and grammar out there.