This morning my wife asked me how to spell the letter H. I said it is spelled H. She said it is spelled A-I-T-C-H and pointed me to a website. I am deeply disturbed by this. Here are my arguments against using letters to "spell letters."
1- If H is spelled aitch then why isn't it spelled aitcaitcaitcaitcaitcaitcaitcaitc... forever and ever?
2- The written H came before the written aitch. It's not a chicken or egg problem. Therefore why complicate a glorified hieroglyph with more glorified hieroglyphs?
3- If there is confusion about what letter is being used, we have a NATO phonetic alphabet to add clarity.
Spelling letters with more letters overcomplicates things and drives me crazy. Change my view.
8th letter of the basic Latin alphabet
etymology - Why is there a word for 'H'? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
pronunciation - Why do we spell the word “who” with a silent “w” when it isn’t needed? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
How do you spell the pronunciation of the letter, H?
H or h is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/, plural aitches), or regionally haitch /ˈheɪtʃ/.[1][2]
Source: Wikipedia
More on reddit.comHow many spells/h
Videos
There are such things as pronunciation guides, which are basically sets of made-up words used to stand for the letters of an alphabet to show how they should be sounded, but these show all letters, not just 'H'. To my knowledge, there is no special word for 'H' that would make it unique from all other letters, and I think you are mistaken.
The only reason why I can think you might believe 'H' is the only letter to have its own phonetic spelling may be because it seems to be discussed more than most, firstly for the reason you quote, namely that some people mistakenly "drop" the letter when pronouncing words that begin with it (eg "I'm 'ungry!"), and secondly, because there are some disagreements over the pronunciation of the letter 'H' - in some regional dialects, natives pronounce it "aitch" while others say "haitch" (the former is considered to be the correct, scholarly pronunciation).
For these reasons there is arguably more discussion over the pronunciation of this letter than any other (or at least a close second to the "zee" and "zed" variations of the letter 'Z') so you may well have seen 'H' represented phonetically more than any other.
In response to OP's specific reference "drop one's aitches":
If I were to write this myself after hearing someone say it I would write "Drop one's h's" as spelling out the names of letters phonetically is very uncommon in writing. This phrase refers to not pronouncing the "H" sound at the beginning of some words (ex. (h)erb vs. herb).
I would follow the same pattern and type:
"cross your t's and dot your i's" as opposed "cross your tees and dot your eyes"
The second is sort of ambiguous and might be used in a humorous way.
The spelling "who" was originally used simply because, in past time periods, this word was pronounced with a "wh" sound. To be clear, by "a "wh" sound" I mean a sound that is different from either "w" or "h" on its own. Although many varieties of English have lost "wh" as a distinct sound, replacing it with plain [w], the digraph "wh" used to (and in some accents still does) have a value that can be transcribed as /hw/, or written with the special symbol [ʍ] if we interpret it as a single sound.
Many aspects of modern English spelling derive from Middle English pronunciation. Analogy with the spelling of other words probably contributed to the continued use of "wh" in spelling even after people started pronouncing the word with a simple /h/ sound. "Who" is one of the many question words starting with wh- in English.
Here is a brief explanation of why who lost its /w/ sound. The sound [w] is made by rounding the lips. The pronunciation of the word "who" evolved over time to have a rounded vowel sound, and the presence of a rounded vowel sound caused people to stop hearing a separate rounded consonant at the start of the word. This has happened in other words, most obviously two.
The question word how lost its /w/ sound for a similar reason, but much earlier, so it has a spelling without "wh".
Unfortunately, irregular spellings in English aren't always etymological. Because of the confusion between "h" and "wh" before rounded vowels, a few words pronounced with a simple /h/ sound are spelled with "wh" before "o" even though, from an etymological perspective, they would be expected to just have "ho". An example is whole, which is etymologically related to heal.
A few blog posts that relate to topics brought up in the comments:
"Hwæt about WH?", by Mark Liberman, 2011 April 13
"The Secret Ways of Weak Forms: Here Comes a New ’Un", by Piotr Gąsiorowski, 2013 February 07
One of the oldest surviving works in any form of English is Beowulf. Here is the first page of the manuscript:
The first line is:
Hƿæt Ƿe garde
which in more modern letters is:
Hwæt We garde
since the ancient letter wynn (Ƿ ƿ) is now represented by double-u (W w).
The first word is "hwæt", which is related to the modern "what" and would have been pronounced "hwat" (to rhyme with "at"). In Middle English, we switched the "h" and "w" around in our spelling, although many speakers continued to pronounce the initial /h/ well into the 20th century.
"Who" is one of the "six Ws" question words:
- who /huː/
- what /wɒt/
- where /wɛə(ɹ)/
- when /wɛn/
- why /waɪ/
- how /haʊ/
For each of the above words starting with /w/, there are some people who still pronounce them starting with /ʍ/ (i.e. /hw/) instead, although this is becoming increasingly rare. All of these words at one point were pronounced starting with /ʍ/.
Wiktionary summarises how "who" became /huː/ nicely:
From [...] Old English hwā [...] Spelling change hw > wh in Middle English (without sound change in initial consonant cluster), while sound change /hw/ > /h/ due to wh-cluster reduction after a bizarre instance of three consecutive vowel shifts of /aː/ to /ɔː/ to /oː/ in Middle English and further to /uː/ in Early Modern English (although only the shift from /ɔː/ to /oː/ is unusual). Compare how, which underwent this change earlier (in Old English), and thus is spelt h.