A Word From ...

Dropping your aitches - an orryble abit. A Word from Mark Dunn

The practice of dropping one's aitches is not simply a feature of modern 'estuary' English. It has been going on for centuries, and has led to the strange situation whereby it is regarded as bad grammar to write an herring, but as good grammar to write an heroic effort.

Why can an be used before some H-words but not others? And which words are they? Why can an heroic effort be correct, but not an herring?

The answer lies with sloppy Romans, zealous scribes, and the slow pace of change in the English language.

Many English words have their origin in classical Latin. For example, horrible, habit, and harmony are derived from the Latin words horribilis, habitus, and harmonia respectively.

But the later Romans were prone to drop their aitches, and when the words passed into French and then English, the h had disappeared from both the pronunciation and the spelling. The earliest recorded English forms of horrible, habit, and harmony are orryble, abit, and armonye respectively. So it was perfectly natural to use the indefinite article 'an' before these words (e.g. an orryble abit).

At a later date, scribes who knew the original Latin restored the 'h' to these words. (They got so carried away, in fact, that an initial h was added to some words that had never previously had one, such as hermit and hostage.) However, the h was still silent, and the indefinite article remained an, rather than a (e.g. an horrible habit).

Gradually, the h in these words began to be pronounced, until now only a very few words in standard English have a silent h (heir, honest, honour, hour, and until quite recently, herb and humble).

Lagging further behind was the use of a as the indefinite article, in place of an. It has still not entirely caught up, but the situations in which an is still used before h are now chiefly restricted to the few words where the h is still silent. Occasionally, an is also used before words where the first syllable is unstressed (an heroic effort, an historic moment), but it is not incorrect to write a heroic effort or a historic moment.

Of course, many words beginning with h did not originate in Latin and were never pronounced with a silent 'h', so the indefinite article before these words was always a rather than an (a hand, a hedge, a holiday).

So if you drop your aitches, you can legitimately claim to be using the original English pronunciation, but only if the word is derived from Latin!

Printer friendly version