Talk:Phonological history of English fricatives and affricates

message: Hi Angr, can you please elucidate why you reverted my addition? The words "herb' and "historic" are commonly pronounced without h, as can be seen from combinations "an herb" and "an historic ..." that are in the majority for these words. −Woodstone 08:14, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)
:I didn't remove what you said, I simply moved it to the last paragraph of the page. The h-less pronunciations of "herb" and "historic" are the older ones; they're not due to h-dropping in English (they're due to h-dropping in Vulgar Latin). The h-ful pronunciations of the words are much later spelling pronunciations. They contrast with h-less pronunciations of "house" and "hundred", which are due to h-dropping in English, because in those words the h-ful pronunciations are older. --Angr 09:23, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Historic herb h-dropping

message: I want someone with a decent sense of the ironic to give us a nice way of pointing out that if people frequently add an 'h' to the word aitch, resulting in naming the letter haitch.  It tickles me.  :D  Wooster (talk) 13:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Haitch is the normal pronunciation of the letter H in Ireland. —Angr 14:07, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not by most educated people (the same being true of the English, of course). --Mel Etitis  (Μελ Ετητης) 15:47, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Really? Every Irish person I've met (who I've heard pronounce the name of the letter) has called it haitch regardless of their level of education. John C. Wells in Accents of English reports it to be a shibboleth in the North, where Protestants call it aitch and Catholics haitch. —Angr 16:20, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

text: It may be one of those things Irish people living in England drop, though, after getting teased about it a few times. (The way Canadians in the U.S. quickly learn to call Z "zee" if they don't want to be giggled at.) —Angr 18:16, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: True enough. --Mel Etitis  (Talk) 15:03, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Well, maybe my experiences in linguistics have made me jaded, but I just don't see anything ironic or amusing about it. It's perfectly natural to want the name of a letter to contain the sound most closely associated with that letter (the only other letters whose names don't are Q and Y). I'm actually a little surprised no dialect of English (AFAIK) calls it "hay" or "hee". I do think, however, that discussion of the names of the letter H would be more appropriate in the article H than here. —Angr 21:40, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My mistake; I must be working in an alternative reality where even perfectly natural human behaviour can still be amusing (I like the quote on your user page about "foolish consistency", by the way).  Still and all, hyper-correcting aitch to haitch (which is what it is in any setting where aitch is standard) would seem to me to be an eminently appropriate example to work with; excluding My Fair Lady's classic treatment, of course.  By the way, in my childhood at least, the "baby name" for h was  ('scuse my inability with IPA symbols and mark-up).  So it was, and probably still is, in a dialect which dies out when we go to school.  :)  Wooster (talk) 21:24, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

text: What do you mean W? That's pronounced , isn't it? :p —Angr 23:50, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point... --Mel Etitis  (Talk) 09:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  h-adding: a request 

message: Could someone add some information about this topic? I am not a native speaker of English, but I heard this several times. I'm curious because it also happens in other languages (e.g. Norwegian) and I can't imagine what kind of strange pronunciation of "r" can make it impossible to pronounce the following "s". Example:  (listen to both clips and notice how "first" and "years" are pronounced). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.177.44.75 (talk) 19:57, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is an influence from the Irish (and isn't only after "r"). --Mel Etitis  (Talk) 20:36, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I could only hear it after "r"s in the clip. Could you give some other examples (or point me to any sources on the net)? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.177.44.205 (talk) 17:48, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  s pronounced as sh after r 

message: The impression I get is that (at least in the dialect of London, and possibly in other regions) by the 16th century, /h/ had completely disappeared as a phoneme in Early Modern English, and that it was (sometimes, often, or perhaps generally, depending on idiolect) phonetically redundantly added to the beginning of vowel-initial words (or perhaps entire prosodic units?) if the initial syllable was stressed (for reasons of hypercorrection or who knows what), or to strongly emphasised words (comparable to how strongly emphasised words may be pronounced with a rolled [r] in some – old-fashioned? – lects or pronunciations, such as on the stage, or while holding a speech). Therefore, the grapheme h lost any connection to the sound [h]. (This state of affairs, or a similar one, seems to have persisted for centuries longer even in the standard language, or at least in some varieties accepted as standard, and in dialects until the present – some creole varieties, such as the eastern varieties of Jamaican Patois, where the [h] is non-phonemic and in "free" variation, seem to presuppose the same pronunciation.) Clearly, that is what David Crystal's work on the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time implies, allowing puns which require, for example, that hour was pronounced identical to whore – and moreover without [h] (in his pronunciation), though when I asked him directly if that means that [h] was generally silent at the time he seemed unwilling to affirm that roundly. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:43, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical h-dropping and h-adding 

message: It seems to me that the section on H-dropping (and that on H-adding, which rather duplicates part of the former section) could be split out into a separate article, particularly as it includes information about languages other than English. Any thoughts? W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:20, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll do this, then, if there are no objections. Also, once this is done, I think we can pretty much merge this page back into Phonological history of English consonants, to simplify the arrangement of these articles, which have a lot of duplication. It would really only involve adding back a few additional details on things like the taught-taut merger to the latter article. W. P. Uzer (talk) 07:42, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

text: I support this. Actually I'm surprised it doesn't have a separate article yet. Peter238 (talk) 07:45, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

text: Since no-one objects, I've done this. W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:28, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: H-dropping as separate article