People from different parts of the world pronounce words in way that I might not. It never occurred to me that it should bother me, or that it made me smarter than anyone else because I said a vowel slightly differently.
It doesn’t. Peeps talk like peeps talk.
I came to this thread to find out what an aitch was.
H.
In some places in the UK it’s haitch (H), which actually makes more sense.
I fail to see how. Yes, I read the article. How do you spell the letter “Y”? It’s “wye”. Would sticking a “Y” in front make more sense?
I don’t think you fail to see how (the initial sound of the letter name matches the sound of the letter). You just fail to agree. “Wye,” unlike “aitch,” at least has the sound in it, at the end rather than the beginning, as do other letters: ef, el, em, en, ar, ess, wye.
I realize I don’t know how to spell the letter names. ell? arr? es?
But it’s not pronounced in the word. It’s a ghost letter. It doesn’t belong there, even ceremonially.
That’s what I meant: there are dialects where it IS pronounced. It doesn’t belong there historically, but it is there practically—in a few places.
A video about the pronunciation of h is https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wVaadU3S9-4?app=desktop .
It’s good to get used to the idea that there’s a lot of variation in the pronunciation of English by native speakers without them trying to be pretentious.
Wubble-you?
Are we talking the “h” in “haitch”? Because it is pronounced in the UK and other English-speaking areas when it’s spelled that way.
The question is how the letter h is spelled if (for example) you ask people to recite the alphabet. In the Republic of Ireland and occasionally in England it’s pronounced as “haitch”. In Northern Ireland it’s typical to pronounce it as “haitch” if you’re a Catholic but not if you’re a Protestant. It’s rare to pronounce it as “haitch” in other English-speaking countries. Of course, if you spell out the word as H, A, I, T, C, H, people anywhere are going to pronounce that word as “haitch”:
Non-aspirating H-er here. When I say the 5 ‘Ws’ of journalism out loud: “Who, What, Why, Where, When” pronouncing all the words as ‘hw’, it not only sounds weird to me, it’s actually a bit tiring to say.
I know all that. Did I explain something incorrectly?
Wow. I have never heard this.
If you do crossword puzzles you’ll soon learn how the letters - or most of them - are spelled.
I don’t know that there is any other that is “official” other than aitch (and haitch). But I’ve seen others used with rather consistent spelling.
Em and en are used for the dashes (-- and —). Tee is used for tee shirt. You have dee and jay in deejay. I’ve seen “oh” to specify someone said the letter instead of the number.
But this dictionary link seem to have all the consonants:
It would sound weird to say “who” that way, at least.
Saying it out loud, mine comes out:
hoo, wut, wye, hwer, hwen.
In my head I thought I was consistent about this sound, but clearly not. “What” sounds wrong aspirated, “where” & “when” sound wrong unaspirated, and “why” works either way.