H

THE LETTER BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

 















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"Aitch" redirects here. For the surname, see Aitch (Aich).

For other uses of "H", see H (disambiguation).

Look up H or h in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

H ( /eɪtʃ/ or /heɪtʃ/ named aitch, plural aitches, sometimes haitch (see below).)^[1] is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Name in English 3 Usage 4 Computing codes 5 See also 6 References

[edit] History

Egyptian hieroglyph fence	Proto-Semitic ħ	Phoenician heth	Etruscan H	Greek Eta

The Semitic letter ‹ח› (ḥêṯ) most likely represented the voiceless glottal fricative (h). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early Greek eta ‹Η› represented /h/, but later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/. In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where Middle English /ɛː/ and /eː/ came to be both pronounced /iː/.

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, but almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as allophone of /s/ in some Spanish-speaking countries. ‹H› is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ‹ch› which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and English, /ʃ/ in French and Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, and /x/ in German, Czech, Polish and Slovak.

[edit] Name in English

In almost all dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/ and spelled ‹aitch›^[1] or occasionally ‹eitch›. The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ and hence a spelling of ‹haitch› is often considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English^[2] and other varieties of English, such as those of Malaysia, India and Singapore. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch.^[3] In Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching and is estimated to be in use by 60% of the population.^[4] The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an HTML page" or "a HTML page". The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.^[5]

The non-standard haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982^[6] and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, careful speakers of English continue to pronounce aitch in the standard way, as the non-standard pronunciation is still perceived as uneducated, at least in most of the United Kingdom.^[7] The pronunciation haitch followed the introduction of Phonics and was designed to help prevent working class children from dropping the initial H in words such as hospital^{[citation needed]} (otherwise pronounced as 'ospital).

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was [ˈaha]; this became [ˈaka] in Latin, passed into English via Old French [ˈatʃ], and by Middle English was pronounced [ˈaːtʃ]. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic.

[edit] Usage

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, variations of the letter are used to represent two sounds. The lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative. A superscript [ʰ] is used to represent aspiration.

In English, ‹h› occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing /h/) and in various digraphs, such as ‹ch› (/tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), ‹gh› (silent, /ɡ/, or /f/), ‹ph› (/f/), ‹rh› (/r/), ‹sh› (/ʃ/), ‹th› (/θ/ or /ð/), ‹wh› ( /hw/^[8]). ‹H› is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed. It is often silent in the weak form of some function words beginning with ‹h›, including had, has, have, he, her, him, his; and in some words of Romance origin and, for some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as in "an historic occasion", "an hotel".

In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen ('heighten'), only the first ‹h› represents /h/. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ‹h› in nearly all instances of ‹th› in native German words such as thun ('to do') or Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater (theater') and Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with ‹th› even after the last German spelling reform.

In Spanish and Portuguese, ‹h› is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] ('son') and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/. The [h] sound exists in a number of dialects in Spanish, either as a syllable-final allophone of /s/ as in Andalusian esto [ˈɛht̪ɔ] ('this'), or as a dialectal realization of /x/, as in Puerto Rican caja [ˈkaha] ('box'). ‹H› also appears in the digraph ‹ch›, which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and /ʃ/ in Portuguese and ‹nh› /ɲ/ and ‹lh› /ʎ/ in Portuguese.

In French, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/. The French language classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways that must be learned to use French properly, even though it is a silent letter either way. The h muet, or "mute h", is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so for example the singular definite article le or la is elided to l'. For example, le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of ‹h› is called h aspiré ("aspirated h", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and is treated as a phantom consonant. For example in le homard ('the lobster') the article leh muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an ‹h› was added to disambiguate the remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters ‹v› and ‹u›: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

In Italian, ‹h› has no phonological value. Its most important uses are to differentiate certain short words, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno, 'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), in short interjections (oh, ehi), and in the digraphs ‹ch› /k/ and ‹gh› /ɡ/.

Some languages, including English, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Finnish, use ‹h› as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, ‹h› is also commonly used for /ɦ/, normally written with the Cyrillic letter ‹г›. (Note the difference from Russian pronunciation and romanisation.)

In Irish, ‹h› after a consonant indicates lenition of that consonant; it is known as a séimhiú.

In most dialects of Polish, both ‹h› and the digraph ‹ch› always represent /x/.

[edit] Computing codes

Alternative representations of H

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Hotel	····

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In Unicode, the capital ‹H› is codepoint U+0048 and the lower case ‹h› is U+0068.

The ASCII code for capital ‹H› is 72 and for lowercase ‹h› is 104; or in binary 01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital ‹H› is 200 and for lowercase ‹h› is 136.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively.

The codepoint U+210E is used for the Planck constant: ℎ.

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: H

• ĥ
• ħ
• Н, н - En (Cyrillic)
• Eta (letter)

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} "H" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch", op. cit.
2. ^ A dictionary of Hiberno-English, Terence Patrick Dolan page 118, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2004
3. ^ Corbett, John (2000). "Literary Language and Scottish Identity". ASLS. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/JCorbett.html. Retrieved 30 January 2011. 
4. ^ Ab(h)ominable (H)aitch by Frederick Ludowyk, Australian National Dictionary Centre
5. ^ Todd, L. & Hancock I.: "International English Ipod", page 254. Routledge, 1990.
6. ^ John C Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, page 360, Pearson, Harlow, 2008
7. ^ 'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?, BBC News, 28 October 2010
8. ^ In many dialects, /hw/ and /w/ have merged

The ISO basic Latin alphabetv · d · e
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter H with diacritics ĤĥȞȟḦḧḢḣḨḩḤḥḪḫH̱ẖĦħⱧⱨ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H"

Categories: Latin letters

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  (Redirected from Eta (letter))

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Greek alphabet
Αα	Alpha	Νν	Nu
Ββ	Beta	Ξξ	Xi
Γγ	Gamma	Οο	Omicron
Δδ	Delta	Ππ	Pi
Εε	Epsilon	Ρρ	Rho
Ζζ	Zeta	Σσς	Sigma
Ηη	Eta	Ττ	Tau
Θθ	Theta	Υυ	Upsilon
Ιι	Iota	Φφ	Phi
Κκ	Kappa	Χχ	Chi
Λλ	Lambda	Ψψ	Psi
Μμ	Mu	Ωω	Omega
Other characters
	Digamma		Stigma
	Heta		San
	Qoppa		Sampi
Greek diacritics

This article is about the Greek letter. For other uses, see ETA (disambiguation).

Eta (uppercase Η, lowercase η) Greek: ἦτα) is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8. Letters that arose from Eta include the Latin H and the Cyrillic letter И.

Contents [hide] 1 History 1.1 Consonant h 1.2 Long e 1.3 Iotacism 1.4 Cyrillic alphabet 2 Uses 2.1 Letter 2.2 Symbol 2.2.1 Upper case 2.2.2 Lower case 3 References

History

In the modern system of writing Ancient Greek, eta represents the long vowel [ɛː]. In Modern Greek, it represents [i]. When the letter was first borrowed, it represented [h]. The letter was borrowed into the Cyrillic alphabet as И.

Consonant h

Eta (Heta) in the function of /h/ on the ostrakon of Megacles, son of Hippocrates, 487 BC. Inscription: ΜΕΓΑΚLES HIΠΠΟΚRATOS. On display in the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, housed in the Stoa of Attalus.

Eta in the function of /h/ on an Attic red-figured calyx-krater, 515 BC. Amongst the depicted figures are Hermes and Hypnos. Inscriptions: HERMES - HYPNOS.

See also: Heta (letter)

The letter shape H was originally used in most Greek dialects to represent the sound /h/, a voiceless glottal fricative. In this function, it was borrowed in the 8th century BC by the Etruscan and other Old Italic alphabets, which were based on the Euboean form of the Greek alphabet. This ultimately gave rise to the Latin alphabet with its letter H.

Long e

In the East Ionic dialect, however, the sound /h/ disappeared by the sixth century BC, and the letter was re-used initially to represent a development of a long vowel /aː/, which later merged in East Ionic with /ɛː/^[1] In 403 BC, Athens took over the Ionian spelling system and with it the vocalic use of H (even though it still also had the /h/ sound itself at that time). This later became the standard orthography in all of Greece. instead.

Other regional variants of the Greek alphabet (epichoric alphabets), in dialects that still preserved the sound /h/, employed various glyph shapes for consonantal Heta side by side with the new vocalic Eta for some time. One of them was a tack-like shape, looking like the left half of an H. This system was first used in the southern Italian colonies of Heracleia and Tarentum. When Greek orthography was codified by grammarians in the Hellenistic era, they used a diacritic symbol derived from this half-H shape to signal the presence of /h/, and added as its counterpart a reverse-shaped diacritic to denote absence of /h/. These symbols were the origin of the rough breathing and smooth breathing diacritics that became part of classical Greek orthography.^[2] The tack symbol has been reintroduced into modern scholarly representation of archaic Greek writing under the name of Heta.

Iotacism

During the time of post-classical Koiné Greek, the /ɛː/ sound represented by eta was raised and merged with several other formerly distinct vowels (iotacism). Thus in Modern Greek, Eta is pronounced [ˈita] and represents the sound /i/ (a close front unrounded vowel). It shares this function with several other letters (ι, υ) and digraphs (ει, οι), which are all pronounced alike (see iotacism).

Cyrillic alphabet

Eta was also borrowed with the sound value of [i] into the Cyrillic alphabet, where it gave rise to the Cyrillic letter И.

Uses

Letter

In Modern Greek the letter, pronounced [ˈita], represents a close front unrounded vowel, /i/. In Classical Greek, it represented a long open-mid front unrounded vowel, /ɛː/.

Symbol

Upper case

The upper-case letter Η is used as a symbol in textual criticism for the Alexandrian text-type (from Hesychius, its once-supposed editor).

In chemistry, the letter H as symbol of enthalpy sometimes is said to be a Greek eta, but since enthalpy comes from ἐνθάλπος, which begins in a smooth breathing and epsilon, it is more likely a Latin H for 'heat'.

Lower case

The lower-case letter η is used as a symbol in:

• Thermodynamics, the efficiency of a Carnot heat engine.
• Chemistry, the hapticity, or the number of atoms of a ligand attached to one coordination site of the metal in a coordination compound. For example, an allyl group can coordinate to palladium in the η¹ mode (only one atom of a allyl group attached to palladium)or the η³ mode (3 atoms attached to palladium).
• Optics, the electromagnetic impedance of a medium, or the quantum efficiency of detectors.
• Particle physics, to represent the η mesons.
• Experimental particle physics, η stands for pseudorapidity.
• Quantum field theory (physics), to represent the metric tensor.
• Statistics, η² is the "partial regression coefficient". η is the symbol for the linear predictor of a generalized linear model, and can also be used to denote the median of a population.
• Economics, η is the elasticity.
• Astronomy, the seventh brightest (usually) star in a constellation. See Bayer designation.
• Mathematics, η-conversion, see lambda calculus
• Mathematics, the Dirichlet eta function, Dedekind eta function, and Weierstrass eta function.
• Biology, a DNA polymerase found in higher eukaryotes and implicated in Translesion Synthesis.
• Neural network backpropagation, η stands for the learning rate.
• Telecommunications Eta stands for efficiency
• Electronics, η stands for the ideality factor of a bipolar transistor, and has a value close to 1.000. It appears in contexts where the transistor is used as a temperature sensing device, e.g. the thermal "diode" transistor that is embedded within a computer's microprocessor.
• Power electronics, η stands for the efficiency of a power supply, defined as the output power divided by the input power.
• Atmospheric science, η represents absolute atmospheric vorticity.
• Rheology, η represents viscosity.

References

1. ^ Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (illustrated ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 10–20. ISBN 0195083458. http://books.google.com/books?id=IeHmqKY2BqoC. 
2. ^ Nick Nicholas (2003), "Greek /h/"

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta"

Categories: Greek letters | Vowel letters

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This decorative initial letter “H”, or drop cap, is from an alphabet designed by Hans Holbein and dating from 1523. It depicts a skeleton, representing Death, dragging off a bishop.

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E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. E= h*v, h = 6.626068 × 10^-34 m² kg / s. 

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Much has been made in recent days of the spelling of a small provincial town on the west coast of the North Island known as Whanganui or Wanganui. A simple ‘h’ is the at the heart of the issue here. The facts of the case are relatively simple. The local iwi, or Maori tribe, have sought for a long time to have the official name spelt as Whanganui, whereas the majority of local residents have voted overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the spelling Wanganui. A formal process was followed, whereby local iwi submitted their case to the New Zealand Geographic Board, the organisation responsible for the matter. Both sides of the argument were heard and debated, with the Board finally recommending the official name be spelt with an ‘h’, subject to final review by the Minister for Land Information, one Maurice Williamson. The Minister showing fine political judgement decided that both spellings were official and could use used, but also requiring Crown agencies adopting the spelling Whanganui. This change would be made over time as signs and so forth are due for replacement. How did the issue arise in the first place? It seems that in the nineteenth century the town was incorrectly, i.e. as a result of an error, spelt without the ‘h’. Over time this simply became common practice. Language is a living organism and so change is inevitable, for whatever reason. Interestingly however the river on which the town is also located is known as Whanganui having being renamed as such in 1991, again due to the wishes of the local iwi. Likewise the local electorate is known as “Whanganui”, the local health authority is the “Whanganui District Health Board”, but the local high school is “Wanganui High School”. Some of this is no doubt the difference between the town itself as an entity, as opposed to the surrounding district. Nonetheless both spelling happy co-exist, side-by-side... Read more

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Hydrogen is the simplest of all the elements, and the most abundant in the universe. It was first identified by the English scientist Henry Cavendish in 1766.

At room temperature and atmospheric pressure, pure hydrogen exists as a diatomic gas (H₂). There is a small amount of hydrogen gas in the Earth's atmosphere; it makes up less than one part per million. Because hydrogen gas is so light, most of it escaped from the lower atmosphere early in the Earth's history. But hydrogen is abundant on Earth in compound form, that is, in more complex molecules where hydrogen has combined with other atoms. Thirteen and a half percent of the atoms in the Earth's crust are hydrogen (most of this hydrogen is in sea water), but because hydrogen is so light, it makes up only 0.75 percent of the Earth's crust by weight. By weight, it is the ninth most abundant element; by number of atoms it is the third most abundant, after silicone and oxygen. Pure, elemental hydrogen must be obtained by dissociating hydrogen atoms from the compounds that contain them, the most plentiful of which are water (H₂O) and hydrocarbons such as methane (CH₄).