Speaking of medieval Spanish “x” that had the Sh sound – the x of algebra (<Arabic al-jabr) had its origin in the work of an Arab mathematician who represented the unknown quantity with the Arabic letter shîn which stood for the word shay’ meaning ‘a thing, something’. Arabic scientific works were translated in Toledo during the High Middle Ages when there was a lot of scholarly interaction between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars. The Spaniard translating the algebraic text into Latin used the letter “x” as the phonetic equivalent of the Arabic “sh” letter. Thus was born the great symbol of the unknown, as in X rays.
I wonder if Malcolm X ever realized his last name was the legacy of medieval Islamic science.
I suspect it may be a regional thing, as it’s certainly evident that the pronunciation of words in DC are different than how they are pronounced, for example, in TX. In the same way I wouldn’t expect someone saying “soeur” in France but near Spain to have the same pronunciation as someone in France but near Luxembourg.
My grandmother gew up in France from 1914 to around 1937 and went back to France several times. My accent is fairly close to what hers was as a former citizen of Normandy. But again, different strokes for different folks. It would not surprise me at all to see both pronunciations work, depending on where one is in France.
missbunny, what’s your background in France/French?
Thank youu jti for putting in a kind word. There are other examples of h aspiré words in the thread to which jti provided a link, and in that thread you can also find a link to a web page that discusses the beginning h French pronunciation/grammar issues in detail.
If I recollect correctly from my historical linguistics class (and I still have my text that I would hate to break out), the /h/ aspirant, voiced or unvoiced, is quite common in almost all Indo-European languages. Therefore, to state specifically when it was adopted as a loan from one I-E language to another is terribly difficult.
However, I do recollect that two sounds with an /h/ aspirant that are terribly uncommon today are /gwh/ and /quh/. Such sounds were found in orighinal I-E, and are only today found in few words such as “quickly” and “where.”
Nevertheless, the aspirant, I believe, is enormously common in most I-E languages, therefore, it is difficult to state when it may have been loaned from one language to another. After all, “chief” and “chef” are both English words that come from the same root, albeit roots that were introduced into English about 200 years apart.
iampunha, regional differences in pronunciation are common, but I don’t think that’s the case here. The unaspirated H is extremely frequent; most words that start HA are unaspirated, as are many that start with HO or HU. (It is less common for HE or HI words to use the unaspirated H but it does happen there too.) (I can’t believe I couldn’t think of any yesterday; there are thousands to choose from.)
If you have a French dictionary, look at the pronunciation guide. There is probably a notation about aspirated vs. unaspirated Hs and how the liaison and elision changes depending on which type the word uses; and if you look at the individual words, you will see a little apostrophe mark in front of the initial vowel sound, which indicates that the H is unaspirated. Plus, I think you have studied French; you know how you learn the article every time you learn a noun? Well, the article will never change just because someone in Lyon pronounces a word differently from someone in Paris. It will always be “le haricot,” never “l’haricot” (thanks, hibernicus).
In answer to your question about my background: besides that I used to live in Paris, I have a B.A. in French, concentration in Language & Culture and a Master’s equivalent in French from the University of Paris (a French program, not a foreign-exchange type thing). Not that I don’t make mistakes in French all the time - I certainly don’t know every word in the entire language - and I am sure a native French speaker can tell that I am not a native speaker, but I am pretty much fluent.
There is a difference between the /h/ consonant as an independent phoneme and the aspiration of other consonants. There is a BIG difference between the Proto-Indo-Hittite “laryngeals” transcribed H[sub]1[/sub],H[sub]2[/sub], and H[sub]3[/sub]. These “laryngeals” did not show up as actual consonants in any daughter languages, except in Hittite. The evidence for their pre-existence was in the effect they had on nearby vowels. There is no way to be sure how they were actually pronounced, if they were pronounced. Apart from the “laryngeals,” the consonant /h/ did not exist in Proto-Indo-European.
The PIE voiced aspirated stops /bh/, /dh/, and /gh/ survived as such only in Sanskrit, changing to various sounds in other languages. The labiovelar voiced aspirate /gwh/ did not even survive in Sanskrit, where it changed to either /gh/ or /h/.
When you wrote that the labiovelar aspirates are “found” in modern English words, I think you meant that these words are descended from PIE roots with the labiovelar aspirates. But in fact there are no aspirate phonemes in English. They have changed into other sounds. PIE *gwh has become w in English. For example, PIE *gwher-mos became English warm.
Linguistic history is not quite as vague as you suggest. It is a fact that the phoneme /h/ had been lost from Vulgar Latin and its descendants for some 2,000 years. The Teutonic Franks brought in lots of Germanic words with /h/, but that too was lost when they took to speaking Romance French. The “aspirated” words in Modern French are of Frankish origin. The Romance /h/ was long vanished.
The occurrence of /h/ in IE daughter languages comes from diverse origins, depending on which language it’s in. In the Germanic languages it came from PIE *k, originally as a velar fricative /x/, becoming /h/ through lenition (softening). In Greek, Armenian, Persian, Sanskrit, and Hindi it resulted from lenition of /s/. In Sanskrit it came from /gh/ and /gwh/. In Latin also it came from /gh/. In Ukrainian it’s a reflex of /g/. In Irish, /h/ turns up in weird ways. In Lithuanian, Russian and other Slavic languages, Romance, Modern Greek, and Tokharian, /h/ does not even exist. Its occurrence is only a secondary development in IE daughter languages, by no means a given.
“Chief” and “chef” are an example of doublets. The same etymon borrowed at different stages wound up as two different words.
I just want to say thank you to everyone here for providing such interesting answers.
Doing some research I found someone who told me that in French, the letter ‘H’ was added in front of some words that couldn’t be distinguished in spelling yet had very different pronounciation.
VITRE could be read ‘vitre’ (glass) or ‘uitre’ (hoyster) so they added an ‘H’ whenever they meant the word to begin with the letter ‘u’. So oyster became spelled ‘huitre’.
However, after having though about it I think I see a flaw in that explanation. Oyster is actually spelled ‘huître’, with a circumflex accent. Doesn’t that meant that the word used to be pronounced ‘uistre’? The Spanish equivalent ‘ostra’ seems to confirm that the word used to have a different pronounciation from ‘vitre’ anyway.
Spanish "H"s are often the remnants of an earlier “f” sound. Spanish harina = Portuguese farina ,Spanish hacer = Portuguese fazer.
The letter “H” probably represented an intermediate stage between the “F” sound and its modern silent form. Old forms of Spanish such as Ladino and some isolated dialects still aspirate the sounds.
As far as Spanish “J” being borrowed from Arabic, its interesting that the Andalucians, who were the most “Arabized” Spaniards pronounce it weakly, while northern Spaniards, who had less Arabic contacts, pronounce the “J” like “ch” in Loch. Perhaps it comes from the Germanic invasions of Spain before the Moors.
The process called “lenition” (softening) often results in /h/ (and then /h/ undergoes lenition to zero). The shift of /f/ > /h/ is well-known in Japanese, where both [h] and [f] are allophones of the same phoneme (call it /F/); both are reflexes of earlier [p]. For example, the name Nippon is now Nihon (instead of *Nifon). In Mongolian and Irish, the process went all the way to zero, so that Proto-Altaic and Proto-Indo-European roots with initial p- now have nothing where the [p] used to be. PIE *pater became Irish athair.
This is not true. The shift to /x/ in Spanish only happened in the last few centuries, I think after the Siglo de Oro. The Arabic language also has the /x/ sound as well as the /h/ sound (plus a third /H/ sound). In medieval Spanish, the Arabic j [dZ] (the sound of “j” in English) was borrowed into Spanish as the same sound. The shift to happened centuries later, after the Arabs were gone. For example, alforja ‘saddlebag’ came from Arabic al-furjah (the j pronounced as in English).
Wasnt there an intermediate period in which /dZ/ became /Z/ due to palatalization (and worked it’s way back towards the throat to arrive at /x/)? IIRC, same thing happened with Latin /l_j/ (as in filia), where /l_j/ became palatalized to /Z/, which now is /x/: FILIA > filia > hija?