It’s probably worth making a few observations at this point.
Firstly, the use of the two different pronunciations seems to be a polarising identifier in that common usage is divided on membership in religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, social class and national groupings - sometimes mutliple, sometimes single membership. I find this an interesting phenomenon.
Secondly, in my opinion, there is a hint that semi-deliberate hegemonic interference with the pronunciation usage will eventually eliminate the haitch usage from the lexicon. I say this as an extrapolation of my first observation. In each of the polarisation group memberships, the users of the haitch pronunciations tend to be the less powerful, less influential more marginalised of the two extremes.
T’would be a pity, I appreciate and encourage diversity in language usage.
I don’t agree - in the case of Ireland there is no prospect of “haitch” being supplanted by “aitch”. Don’t forget this is the majority (almost universal) pronunciation in the Republic of Ireland, and you needn’t think the Northern Catholics lightly throw away their cultural distinctions either.
Since nearly all parents and teachers in the Republic are bringing up their children to say “haitch”, and they in turn will presumably teach their children to do likewise, by what mechanism do you think this usage will die out?
In Sydney the “haitch” was definitely a catholic thing. In Melbourne I seem to hear “aitch” more often - but maybe I’m just hanging out with more proddies these days.
The OP sounds more like an IMHO question. Lived in the US all my life and never heard “haitch” but once thought it was only logical that it should be that way.
But since this is GQ: The letter H is (indirectly) derived from the Greek letter Éta, which in ancient times was called a Héta. Somewhere along the line it lost its “ay” pronounciation and status as a vowel to become our familiar consonant.
No, because tch != t + c + h. There is no glottal fricative in “aitch.”
My mother spent a short period of time between husbands teaching English and often lectured me on its usage. My mother was raised in a very wealthy family and she taught me that aitch/haitch was be the deliniation between those with class and those without. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that she meant
class - Church of England
no class - Catholic (or rat catcher as they were known in my childhood home)
I think we in Australia often forget that that particular divide was so huge not terribly long ago. In my youth if I brought home a Catholic friend who was not Italian or Indian (they were forgiven) it was made very clear they were not to come again. Just as well we gave up the White Australia Policy so we could give up having to ask people to spell house in order to find out if we should hate them or not, we got people from all over who weren’t like us and who had no class!
FWITW - Australian english is heavily influenced by 19th century cockney.
I remember seeing a documentary called ‘Mother Tongue’ which had a scene where a Londoner was reading to his child. When they got to the letter H he read;
“That’s an 'edge 'og, it’s two words, 'edge and 'og and they bofe start wiv a haitch.”
I’m from NSW, in my experience there are two Australian accents, usually called cultivated Australian and working class Australian. The former pronounce it aitch and the latter haitch. Country people are more likely to use working class and North Shore and Eastern Suburbs Sydney people are more likely to use cultivated. This is, of course, a massive generalisation.
Thylacine is quite right - and of course most Catholics who weren’t Italian were of Irish ancestry. It wasn’t one-sided either - Catholics harrassed Protestants as much as Protestants harrassed Catholics. Catholics were working-class Labor voters, Protestants middle-class Liberal voters.
