Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the phoneme principally associated with each letter concerned features prominently in the name of the letter. If the rule is stated this way there are still a couple of exceptions, but many fewer.
The name of this letter in my native Hiberno-English is universally haitch, and when I heard British English speakers saying aitch I assume they were simply dropping the initial -h- as they do with so many other -h- words. It came as a great surprise to me to discover that that was not how they saw the matter themselves.
I say “aitch” because that’s how it is spelled (well actually no, I say “aitch” because I was brought up saying it that way, but I feel justified in saying “aitch” because that’s how it is spelled.)
I first came across “haitch” when I moved from New Zealand to Australia. Interestingly, some Australians who say “aitch” are of the belief that they are dropping the “h”, not that they are saying the word as spelled.
Something I learned from talking to people about the pronunciation of aitch, is that many people don’t realise that a letter has a name, and the name has standardised spelling just like every other word, i.e., you can look it up in the dictionary.
I am somewhat unconvinced by this. I’m not disputing that these things are, as a factual matter, in dictionaries. But I question of whether they are really part of the language, since nobody uses them. If we want to write a letter, we write the letter. We write “b”, not bee.
The fact that nobody actually uses them is reflected even in dictionaries. Look at Merriam-Webster for “bee”, and the second definition is indeed the letter “b”. But if you look at the entry for the letter “b”, the word “bee” is not used anywhere. Likewise “aitch” is not found anywhere in the entry for the letter “h”, etc.
I see it like one vs 1. “One” is the name for the symbol “1”. "Aitch is the name for the symbol “H”. You will rarely see “one” printed in a math text book, but that doesn’t make “one” somehow less of a word than any others.
But one, two, three etc. are very commonly used when writing numbers in text. There is no similar role for the words for letters. I’m not even sure how to spell half of them, and I’m a literate native speaker. That’s because I never see them or use them in writing. The only exception is “aitch” - which comes up occasionally when discussing the pronunciation.
For what it’s worth, the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for aitch (defined as “the name of the letter H, h”) and, in that entry, haitch is noted as alternative spelling.
There is a separate (and much fuller) entry for H, tracing the letter back through the Greek Heta, Eta to the Semitic Hheth, Kheth. The Semitic letter represented “a laryngal or guttural spirant, or a rough aspirate”, as at first did the Greek letter, and in due course the Latin letter.
But over time, both in Greek and later in Latin, the letter either came to signify a vowel, or simply became unvoiced. But it didn’t do this consistently; sometimes it signfied a vowel or was unvoiced; sometimes it was a gutteral or a voiced aspirate. And of course exactly the same is true in modern English.
And this probably helps to explain the persistence of the two names, or the two versions of the name, of this letter. Aitch/haitch, again according to the OED, probably goes back to “a late Latin *accha , *ahha , or *aha , exemplifying the [gutteral] sound”. This follows a model that survives in Italian as effe , elle , emme. (You can guess what letters those are the names of.) Because we want letter-names to exemplify the correspondings sound, as aitch evolved not to do so, the haitch variant emerged.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to guess that haitch as the dominant name for this letter predominates in variants of English in which the letter is most often voiced (like Hiberno-English) and vice versa for variants of English is which it is least often voiced.
The most common use for the letter names I’ve seen is to indicate a speaker is saying the letters rather than the sounds they represent. Regardless, the frequency you see something used shouldn’t have a bearing on its legitimacy, nor should your knowledge of how to spell it.
Wikipedia has the following on the topic of letter names:
The names of the letters are sometimes spelled out. Some compound words (e.g., tee-shirt, deejay, emcee, okay, etc.), derived forms (e.g., exed out, effing, to eff and blind, aitchless , etc.) and objects named after letters (e.g., em in printing and wye in railroading) may be written with the letter names. The spellings listed below are from the Oxford English Dictionary. Plurals of consonant names are formed by adding -s (e.g., bees, efs, ems ) or -es in the cases of aitch, ess , and ex (i.e., aitches, esses, exes ). Plurals of vowel names add -es (i.e., aes, ees, ies, oes, ues ), but these are rare. Most commonly, the letter (generally in capitalized form) and not its name is used, in which case plural just adds -s .
Chimes exactly with my (Anglo-Scottish London-living middle-class aitch-saying) upbringing. It was firmly instilled that “haitch” was “common” (and not in a good way), but I wasn’t aware of the Irish connection. That came later, when an Australian friend told me it was taken there as a marker of Catholic schooling.
I wonder about the regional (and class) distribution of both pronunciations across these islands. My guess is that there isn’t a universally-applicable mapping of either to any particular class or regional accent divide.
Agreed. I say aitch (most of the time), my Welsh wife says haitch. We don’t have arguments about it, it’s just regional pronunciation. Nothing we were taught in schools.
Of course it does. These things don’t come down from on high. If something is not generally used, it is not part of the language. I’d rate most of the letter words as “obscure”, at least.
I think the best case you’ve made for some of them actually being used is when they occur in words like tee-shirt, emcee and okay. Does that mean, by the way, that the “word” for the letter “o” is also “o”?
Which is why I wrote “I believe…” because I was not 100% certain. Granted its a small subset but many (double digit) former colleagues from the UK all said it that way.
I too am not of the opinion that most letters have words for them, outside of things like scrabble where people have motivation to invent short words and pretend they’re real if they have the thinnest shred of credibilty.
Part of my reason for thinking this is because I am doubtful that the purported letter-words have any sort of standardized spelling. Which is to say that the spelling of the letter-word must always match its pronunciation - accounting for the regional variation. Spellings of actual words don’t really have regional variation in my experience; the closest you get to that is when a person is not writing out words, they’re writing out the phonetic sounds, eh? Ehh? Ehhhhhh?
I also personally resist spelling any letter with a single letter. Which is to say, I’d spell ‘i’ as ‘eye’ if I was trying to indicate that the person was saying the letter-name aloud.
I’m not sure it’s up to opinion. The letters are symbols and the symbols all have names and the names all have a defined spelling (in the dictionary of choice). If you decline to recognise the dictionary as some kind of arbiter on spelling then all betts are off I guess.
Sure, there are some letters that have different names in different dialects, just like other words. Aluminum vs Aluminium for example (my browser spellcheck is rejecting “aluminum”), so that’s not a good case against letters having words for them. Letters are symbols, the “words for them” are the names of the symbols. Whether they get used often or not, or have different names in different dialects is beside the point, an H is just a symbol. Another example is Z. In many English speaking countries the name for the letter Z is “zed”. In the USA and (I presume?) Canada it is “zee”. These aren’t different pronunciations of Z, they are different names for the symbol Z.
When I point out that “haitch” doesn’t have an entry in the dictionary, all I’m really saying is that that name for H isn’t common enough for it to have been adopted by dictionaries. Presumably it will be sometime in the future as “haitch” becomes more common. This is as opposed to “zed” vs “zee” and “aluminium” vs “aluminum” which all have enough users that they get their own entries.
Understandable. I note that all of the letters that use themselves for their name are named for one of the sounds they make. They happen to be all of the vowels.
Depends on the dictionary you consult. The Oxford English Dictionary records both aitch and haitch *(as well as H, which is a separate entry), zed and zee (as well as Z).
I’m disputing more than just the exact spelling, I’m questioning whether the words really exist as a generally accepted part of the language. And that’s certainly not dictated by dictionaries.
