H "atich" and "haitch" - please explain!

[coppit]

So, the letter H...

"aitch" and "haitch" - are both correct (so you just pronounce it how you like) or is "haitch" actually incorrect.

Thanks!

Tiggy, i think i love you

although, i have to say i like "wubble-yew" and "y-eye"

Yes Tiggy, I wish I could be more relaxed about this, but deep down I agree with you that it's important to have standards .

Ooh, thank you Nickelbabe, it's been ages since I've been loved (or even noticed) by someone new. How exciting! I'm married but don't let that stand in your way. Are you a man? A handsome rich one? Actually, what the hell, I don't care if you are a poor, plug-ugly woman, I'm still excited.

Anyway, just looked back and read lovelycoffee's earlier musings on this, and I agree that it is entirely wrong for Southerners to correct Northerners with the 'cassle' versus 'carsle' thing. There are regional accents and there is received pronunciation, both of equal status in my book, just different, and nothing more than a class/region indicator. I find some regional accents beautiful and some ghastly, but none wrong. BUT: (once more with feeling...) this a word that begins with A!!!!!! In the flippin' dictionary! Filed under A!!!

Unless you are of Caribbean heritage and routinely aspirate imaginary aitches on all words starting with vowels, and equally routinely drop real aitches, (and I appreciate they don't all do it) then this is not truly a heritage/dialect thing, and it won't stand up in court. As I said before it happens across all regions (and to a lesser extent) all classes. There is no (regional) choice to aspirate it or not, like with hotel and historian, because it doesn't start with a flippin' H!

I'm not saying that everyone who does is it trying consciously to speak 'nicely', only that most people, IMHO, have heard it mispronounced relentlessly, throughout their lives, by people who were hyper-correcting misguidedly, and it has now become so ingrained that they just assume it's correct. As I said - it's the ROOT of the problem. Blimey, I'm even boring myself now!

Fancy a date Nickelbabe? The library? Pedants' Convention?

Only joking, don't panic.

TiggyR what about issues of heritage? I can only speak about the Liverpool area on this - it might be that others regions have different linguistic histories - for the first part of this century there was mass immigration from Ireland to Liverpool. I have recently been researching my family tree and was amazed to discover that at every turn my ancestors were Irish. The Irish accent has heavily influenced the Liverpool region accent, including the use of "haitch". See the following (if you are interested!) for an analysis of how the Liverpool accent changed from largely Lancashire tones to pronunciation influenced by immigration (OK it?s from Wikipedia, not entirely reliable but you get the jist...)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouse

I guess my point is, that at least in the area I grew up in there are linguistic historical reasons for this and no basis for the hyper correction argument - the urge to speak "nicely" isn't relevant.

OED has a long history based on received pronunciation (historically educated south east in effect)its evolving over time and I hope will eventually more fully reflect the wide range of linguistic heritage in this country rather than just one corner .

Well I agree with you, if we were only discussing how accents develop and evolve (My God, you've only got to listen to anyone under 25 who has been brought up in London to know that their accent bears no relation whatsoever to how young Londoners sounded even 10 years ago, due to the huge impact of Black American popular culture via TV and music, mixed with the huge amount (and ethnic variety) of immigrants who have settled in and around London in recent years and the influences thereof) but whilst I agree that there may well be a proliferation of Hatiches in L'pool because of the Irish connection it still doesn't make it right! Besides which, it's the general lack of aspirating on any other imagined aitches that makes me a bit about the regional argument for haitch....

I'm not suggesting that dialects are invalid, or that they shouldn't be embraced in colloquial speech and writing, but lovely and interesting though they are, they are not standard English! Sorry, but they are not. We can't make allowances for every variation of speech and give them all equal billing in standard English just because no-one wants to be the one doing it 'wrong'! We have to work from a blueprint somewhere along the line.

Incidentally, I would never routinely correct someone's grammar or mispronunciation to their face (apart from my DCs) because I think it's a bit rude and unnecessarily smug, and I don't like making people feel belittled, and God knows I'm not perfect. I am happy to accept that people always have and always will make the Haitch mistake, I'm just not prepared to accept that it is a valid pronunciation of a word that begins with A!

I will admit to correcting "less" and "fewer" when friends use them incorrectly (and yes, they are still friends! )

I strongly suspect the reason people get so excited about this non issue is the interweaving of pronunciation/ accent with the British neurosis regarding class.

Just thought of a good analogy actually. People of African-Caribbean heritage (not sure if it applies to non-Caribbean black people - don't know many!) commonly say 'arks' instead of 'ask'. I have absolutely no idea where this stems from, or why they do it, but it has become a cultural habit, handed down through generations. I'm sure they don't spell it 'arks' and I'm not aware that they do it with other words using the 'sk' blend, so no 'gaksets' or 'baksets' instead of gaskets and baskets. But on the basis that hundreds of thousands, nay millions of them do it, should we introduce it into standard English as a valid alternative to 'ask' and put it in the OED?

What do you cultural/regional Haitch people think?

BTW if anyone knows about the arks thing, please put me out of my misery!

Ax for 'ask' is common in some communities in the US.

Sorry, Lovelycoffee, your link to wiki re: scouse didn't work, so can't see any specfic references to haitch, so didn't refer to it in my last answer, but I'll take your word for it that it's there!

TiggyR - I believe 'Aks'/'ax' is from a creole (as is 'innit')

Lovelycoffee - There has been lots of interesting linguistic discussion on this thread but I still completely agree with TiggyR - this has nothing to do with dialect and everything to do with either first-hand hyper-correction or the repetition of someone else's hypercorrecting (apart from in Irish if that is the case - I have never studied Irish English so I really don't know about that)

I don't think 'haitch' is at all acceptable - sorry!

Lovelycoffee - I believe Estuary English is now more prevalent than RP

Here's a nice quote for us all to ponder:

David Crystal: 'Standards exist to avoid the dangers of variability'
(or something like that)
Make of that what you will

Here you go TiggyR

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouse]

Its in the second para under the subheading -phonological features.

I think we will have to agree to disagree but I would hope you would at least agree with me that some of the references in this thread to people who say "haitch" as "mornic", "ill-educated", "losers" and "ignorant" are pretty annoying to anyone who says "haitch" not to say wrong! (I'm not saying you used any of those words).

It will be a sad day when we all talk exactly the same like clones (which is happening a bit with estuary English in the south)- variety is the spice of life!

oops stil got it wrong! Sorry here it is again

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouse

Language does evolve (I have finally now accepted the "new" meaning for "hopefully" ) but like sasamaxx, I just can't accept "Haitch" because it is just wrong (for the reasons that sasamaxx gives).

Interestingly, I have arguments with dh about those people who use "I done" or "He has went", where I half defend them on the basis that certain idiosyncracies can be indicative of a sort of patois. However, I will only defend such speech if people then know "their audience" and can revert to "correct" English when appropriate. Unfortunately, in most cases, they cannot

Lovely Coffee
It would be a sad day indeed if we all spoke the same way.
I think that if (the study of) linguistics teaches you anything, it's that no variety is superior to another and no person's way of speaking is any better than anyone else's.

That said though, there are rules breaking these rules don't mean you're rtupid - there are plenty of speakers of perfect standard English, using a perfect RP who are thick as mince

Sorry about the typos above - NAK

So it should actually read:
'That said though, there are rules. Breaking these rules doesn't mean you're stupid.......'

"Hopefully" should mean being "full of hope", but more people use it nowadays to mean "I hope".

I think it's more that nowadays people use hopefully to mean 'I am full of hope that xyz'. Or they use it in the correct adverbial sense to describe a manner of doing something but I agree that's becoming rarer.

But hopefully is not the state of being full of hope, that would be hopeful. Not sure if that's what you meant but your post didn't seem to be very clear.

I'm with you on defending speech where it's a recognised (by the speaker) dialect or patois because otherwise it's just ignorance and I'm not usually up for defending that. Only in small children who remain blissfully ignorant of bribery, schemes to get them to bed early and where I hide confiscated toys.

How is W- a valid pronunciation of a word that starts with D (double-u, or doubleyou, or how is it spelled anyway?)

"If we allow ourselves to become too casual our language will cease to make any sense at all. " But in general, you don't need to have a crusade over this - the linguistic "standards" (which I think too often have an almost moral connotation) tend to manage themselves to retain communicative clarity and reduce anbiguity. What they don't do is preserve what people find aesthetically pleasant.

An example would be the shift of English from a synthetic language (grammar based on case-endings) to a largely analytic language (based on word order) - part of this change may have been due to interaction with Norse speakers, and case endings gradually being dropped - you can bet that riled any number of Anglo-Saxon pedants - damn Vikings, and all that. There are lots and lots of examples from the Early Modern period of people raging against the "decline" of English - plus ça change, and all that.

I can highly recommend Jean Aitchison: Language Change: Progress or Decay for a lucid and extremely interesting take on the subject.