Stan at Sentence first has a good post about the Hibernian use of “haitch” for the letter most of the English-speaking world knows as “aitch.” I’ve always found it charming, and am amused by the example he provides of an issue of “the local freesheet Galway Advertiser” that in repeating a headline on the second page of a story has “a HSE” (i.e., Haitch Ess Ee) where the first version had “an HSE” (i.e., Aitch Ess Ee; see his post for screenshots). I was even more amused by the misguided historical analysis underlying the peevery cited at the end of this passage:
The history of h-dropping and h-adding at the start of various words is quite a tangle, made worse by the fact that people often feel their own version must be correct and others’ therefore can’t be. I’ve seen real fury directed at the American practice of muting the H in herb, from listeners probably unaware that sounding the H was a later convention.
He goes on to discuss the history of the name “aitch,” which goes back (via Old French ache) to “a late Latin *accha, *ahha, or *aha,” and ends with the extremely interesting information that “haitch” is spreading—see the telling graph from John Wells—and the following speculation: “I wonder whether aitching H correlates at all with the wine–whine merger – or, phrased another way, whether haitching H correlates with pronouncing wine and whine differently.” Lots of good stuff in the comment thread as well.
I’d always thought “haitch” was an exclusively Irish pronunciation, so I was surprised to hear one of the commentators in the recent world chess championships refer repeatedly to “the haitch file”; he was from Tamil Nadu. Apparently it’s common in India (as a commenter on John Wells’s blog confirms).
It’s a minority pronunciation in Australia, as commenters at Stan’s have noted. As I noted there, it’s uncorrelated with wine-whine, which was pervasive in the U.S. until just decades ago, whereas aitch has been used in the U.S. for centuries. It’s just that Ireland has both.
(I meant Stan’s blog of course, not John Wells’s.)
I live in a mixed household: my wife (brought up in Dublin) says “haitch”, my daughter (educated at a Catholic school in London) says “haitch” but I (educated at standard state schools in Hertfordshire) say “aitch”.
The Catholic/Protestant divide is hardly definitive. One of the few Oireachtas politicians who says “an HSE” is Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, a Sinn Féin member who attended Monaghan Christian Brothers’ School.
The name in Spanish is ‘hacha’ rather than ‘acha’, which is just etymologically novel as the Irish but has no effect on pronunciation. In French, the Académie used to prescribe ‘he’ [hə] rather than ‘ache’ [aʃ], which was a bit mean of it.
A friend from East Boston does this. The cable channel HBO is “Haitch B O”. I don’t know whether this is characteristic of East Boston generally or perhaps just the Irish-American grandfather who raised him. My friend merges whine and wine.
In French, the Académie used to prescribe ‘he’ [hə] rather than ‘ache’ [aʃ], which was a bit mean of it.
It certainly was! I wonder if Mme Ruegg (who bullied us into learning decent French in high school) knew that?
Ireland isn’t the only part of the British Isles where “haitch” is used fairly commonly. I’ve heard it in many different accents among freshers.
On a related note, to this Scot’s ears all Englishmen “drop” the ‘h’, but with different frequencies. And I have a profound distaste for the absurd use of “an historian” or “an hotel” by anyone who wouldn’t drop those ‘h’s in his own speech. Why? I dunno; maybe because it’s bloody stupid?
As a teacher in Thailand, I’ve noticed that Thai learners of English almost universally say “haitch” rather than “aitch”. This is quite useful in distinguishing “aitch” from the phonologically very similar (to Thai ears) name of the letter “s” (these two letters are pronounced /he:t/ and /et/ respectively by most Thais).
In French, the Académie used to prescribe ‘he’ [hə] rather than ‘ache’ [aʃ],
What is the date of this prescription? It must go back to the time when [h] was still used in Standard French, which is quite a while ago. If no one uses [h] anymore, the name of the letter would be the same as that for e, namely [ə]. I have never heard of this, or of any pronunciation except ‘ache’ [aʃ] (most likely from ‘hache’). Madame Ruegg knew what she was doing.
[h] still survives in some dialects, eg in dehors ‘outside’ pronounced [dehɔr] not [dəɔr] (in two syllables), but has not been used in Standard French for a long time. I don’t think any current Académicien has ever used it, and not many can have heard it.
“What is the date of this prescription?” Apologies, the link I gave was tied to a HTTP session. Anyawy, TLF s.v. “H, h, subst.” has the remark
I guess 1878 is “quite a while ago” fsvo “quite” and “while”.
“I’ve seen real fury directed at the American practice of muting the H in herb, ”
Behold the power of class anxiety.
“tied to a HTTP session”
I swear I didn’t plan that.
I have a profound distaste for the absurd use of “an historian” or “an hotel” by anyone who wouldn’t drop those ‘h’s in his own speech.
Me too, and I routinely change “an” to “a” in such cases while editing. It’s nice to have the power to do something about it!
I don’t know if I’ve confessed to it here but I have a problem: I’m an accent sponge. I pick up some of the accents of the places I’ve lived, so that now I speak in a monstrous hodgepodge. Anyway, recently I’ve started haitching, and I have no idea why or where it came from. I’ve never been to Ireland & haven’t had any Irish acquaintances in years. Don’t think I know anyone who haitches. Send help.
Hat- could you unpack ” the misguided historical analysis underlying the peevery” a bit? Misguided how? What is the true history, as you understand it?
Well, obviously, “Garrigus Carraig”, it dates from your adoption of that pseudonym. Shoulda stuck with “Komfo Amonan”.
How swiftly help arrives in these precincts!
“Haitch” is a fairly common pronunciation in London and the South East of England in general.
Hat- could you unpack “the misguided historical analysis underlying the peevery” a bit? Misguided how? What is the true history, as you understand it?
It’s not a matter of how I understand it, it’s just history: herb is from Old French erbe (in fact, in Middle English it’s usually written erbe). The OED says: “In Old French and Middle English occasionally spelt with h after Latin; regularly so since c1475, but the h was mute until the 19th cent.” In other words, the (spoken) /h-/ was originally a spelling pronunciation, exactly the kind of “error” that gets people laughed at by pedants (and doubtless got the first people who used it laughed at). The people who get angry at Americans for not pronouncing the h are simply ignorant, since it is we Americans who preserve the original form and they who are innovating; there’s no sin in ignorance, of course, but there is in ignorantly attacking people for an error which in fact the attacker, not the attackee, is committing.
Grackle, he means this: ‘I’ve seen real fury directed at the American practice of muting the H in herb, from listeners probably unaware that sounding the H was a later convention.’
“Haitch” is pretty common in Scotland, where whales always differ from Wales.
Personally I distinguish w/wh but say “aitch.”
This link provides the definitive comment on the aitch/haitch rivalry, and on any associated pedantry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3y0CD2CoCs
Haitch is better than aitch for distinguishing H.A. from A.J. , and H.E. from A.G.
Conversely, if a speaker uses aitch and a listener uses haitch, then the listener is liable to mishear the speaker’s H.A. as A.J.
mollymooly: French h: he [hə], ds Ac. 1762-1878 et ailleurs
1762 makes sense as a date when [h] was still in general use, and it looks like the Académie’s prescription was still valid in 1878 although the pronunciation might have been considered old-fashioned and on its way out, since the recommendation was not renewed in later editions of the dictionary, most likely because [h] was no longer part of Standard pronunciation.
Haitch is fairly common in Cape Breton as well. I probably used it about half the time. I think I use it more often now, because I now live in Malaysia, where haitch is the norm.
I use article “a” before a stressed syllable starting with “h” (“a history”) and “an” before an unstressed syllable starting with “h” (“an historical novel”). The “h” starting an unstressed syllable drops out, optionally, but even when it remains, the preceding article is “an”. That’s just the way it works for me. I guess the “a”/”an” alternation is not quite phonetic, any longer. (Sorry if that offends anyone’s sensibilities.)
I have seen somewhere (can’t recall where) the theory that “h” is epenthesized to some vowel initial words by speakers of a dialect which epenthesizes glottal stop before phonemic vowels and optionally drops phonemic “h”. They hear a word starting with a vowel and no added [?], and can only suppose that an /h/ was intended, but was elided.
My mother used to say “an hibachi,” which seemed odd to me.
Some of these people, as mentioned above, do drop them in front of unstressed syllables. Others probably use a (breathy-)voiced [ɦ], which strikes me at least as less audible than [h], particularly in unstressed syllables.
Yet others have learned it as an absurd spelling rule free of any connection to pronunciation. We hates them. All power to the Hat.
…I had no idea! Where are they spoken?
That’s several hundred years later than I’d have guessed! What’s the evidence like? Were there orthoepists who described it?
(I heard la haine with [h] on TV once. But the speaker was a Mauritanian in Mauritania.)
I’ve heard hache aspiré actually aspiré from a youngish speaker from Brittany, who couldn’t speak Breton (though her mother did) and seemed to my not very well attuned ear to be speaking pretty standard French in other respects.
Personally I distinguish w/wh but say “aitch.”
^^ same here.
David M.: there are some francophones in Canada whose consonant phoneme inventory still includes /h/. In Québec, because of the influence of the standard, such speakers tend to be older, but outside Québec I have occasionally heard some younger speakers with this phoneme in their repertoire (and with other conservative features which in Québec are associated with older speakers less exposed to the standard).
In their speech such words as HACHE, HONTE and HAIE are all realized with word-initial /h/: indeed the first word and the name of the letter /h/ forms a nice minimal pair, with the name of the letter and the word for “axe” differing solely because the former is h-less and the latter begins with /h/.
Outside Canada some varieties of French spoken in the West Indies also preserve this phoneme, unsurprisingly (since the West Indies and Canada were colonized at about the same time any conservative feature will typically be shared in both locations).
Merci, Etienne, I had been hoping that you would come in with some precisions.
If the loss of [h] had occurred “hundreds of years ago” as David thought, the sound would have been lost long before Canada and the West Indies were colonized.
H aspiré is still pronounced in in the Belgian accent around Liège (mostly older speakers, I think). Littré also recommends it in his dictionary (1870s), but he is pretty conservative in his pronunciation guidelines. He writes, “Aujourd’hui, surtout à Paris, beaucoup n’aspirent pas l’h et se contentent de marquer l’hiatus : le éros, la onte, etc. ; mais, dans plusieurs provinces, la Normandie entre autres, l’aspiration est très nettement conservée, et cela vaut mieux” (http://littre.reverso.net/dictionnaire-francais/definition/h).
On aitch vs. haitch, I recommend this Mitchell and Webb sketch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo8FR8GGoJ0.
SB: Littré’s comment fits in with [h] being standard in 1762 and on its way out by 1878 (the dates quoted above about the Académie’s position). Nowadays the “h aspiré” is a ‘phantom consonant’ since it does not have a sound but still acts as a consonant to prevent liaison and vowel elision, as in Littré’s examples, and also la hache (not *l’hache) ‘the axe, the hatchet’. With few exceptions the words containing it are of Germanic origin and frequently have counterparts with /h/ in English, as in my example.
I grew up in Southern Normandy and [h] in such words sounds familiar. I must have heard it sometimes, probably from older rural people.
I generally pronounce the letter h as aitch.
And something in me just rejects “an hero,” “an historical,” etc. and reads these as “an kxero,” “an kxistorical,” etc. which can be annoying.
@mollymooly:
That would be hache. Hacha is ‘axe’, a relatively modern borrowing from French hache.
As an Irish saurian in the UK, I tend to multi-aitch; when pronouncing the letter h, I say haitch around compatriots and aitch when speaking to English people. I do this partly to be pragmatic (some English people just don’t understand haitch, and it’s extra hassle you don’t need when you’re spelling your postcode over the phone to the water company) and also from unadmirable linguistic cowardice, out of fear I’ll be perceived as quaint or uneducated. The other great Hiberno-English/standard English point of non-comprehension is the pronunciation of the letter r. Irish people (and Australians) say or; standard English insists on ar. Another deal-breaker with the water company.
Irish people (and Australians) say or
I did not know that! Thanks for reviving this very interesting thread.
The ‘ore’ pronunciation isn’t universal, though. My impression is that it’s mainly middle-class Dublin. I’m originally a culchie who says ‘are’, and I associate ‘ore’ with my Dublin cousins. Here’s a 2011 letter to the Irish Times, from a Dr John Doherty (Rathmines and Rathgar are affluent southside Dublin suburbs):
some English people just don’t understand haitch
I find that hard to swallow: I suspect they are pretending not to understand.
the pronunciation of the letter r. Irish people (and Australians) say or; standard English insists on ar
the ‘ore’ pronunciation isn’t universal, though
For a great many Irish people ‘or’ and ‘ore’ are not the same thing.
Not necessarily. I’m used to German J being /jeː/. Every single time I didn’t pay attention and said it that way here in Berlin, people understood G, /geː/. Only /jɔt/ gets people to write my name right, even after I’ve already pronounced it, and even after I’ve talked to them enough that they’ve figured out I’m not from here (where the dialect completely merged /g/ into /j/, and this is commonly encountered in many words in today’s Standard-based vernacular).
All very well, but there is no such ambiguity between /eɪtʃ/ or /heɪtʃ/ and any other letter name, or indeed any word of any kind.
@Russian Dinosaur The other great Hiberno-English/standard English point of non-comprehension is the pronunciation of the letter r. Irish people (and Australians) say or; standard English insists on ar. Another deal-breaker with the water company.
I am struggling to understand what is meant by this. I often have trouble “hearing” a sound designated as “or” or “ar”. IPA would be more helpful, even though I am not exactly expert in its use. The fact that, as an Australian English speaker, my accent is non-rhotic probably contributes to my confusion.
Do “or” and “ar” represent the pronunciations with or without the “r”?
I cannot ever recall a fellow Australian pronouncing the letter R with the vowel sound in “or”. I have only ever heard “ar” (with and without the “r”).
For example, I would spell out the name “Martha” as EM AY AH TEE AITCH AY and the name Dora as DEE OH AH AY or possibly DEE OH AH RAY. The Irish Republican Army acronym would be EYE AH AY (where EYE is pronounced like the organ of sight) or possibly EYE AH RAY.
BTW or, ore and awe are homophones for me but I have never heard that vowel sound used for the letter R by an Aussie.
And I have no idea what the water company reference is about. I feel foolish asking because I suspect the answer will be blindingly obvious.
Presumably pronouncing R as ‘or’ would throw the other person off completely: ‘What do you mean, “8 or 2”?’
This could be quite important since the postcodes in England enable the other party to pinpoint your location. I didn’t realise that until I happened to make a phone call from a relative’s house in England and the other party (some kind of public service) said ‘So you’re in such-and-such a street?’
“The water company” is just an example of someone you might be talking to on the phone for whom you need to spell your name or postal code or what not.
So this pronunciation of the letter R, is it “or” or “ore”, NORTH or FORCE? Or do those who use it equate NORTH and FORCE anyway?
BLACKADDER: I spy with my little eye something that begins with [ɑ].
BALDRICK: Army!
BLACKADDER: [ɑ]. [rːːːːː].
Definitely NORTH. One might further split NORTH into LOT + /r/ (“or”, “for”) and THOUGHT + /r/ (“war”, “aura”) in which case I suppose “R” is still like “or” as NORTH.
It has often been remarked with surprise that the natives of Ireland always apply the aspirate correctly, not only at the beginning of words, but also after w, and in the middle of words. This excellence has doubtless originated chiefly in the national mode of pronouncing the name of the aspirate; for, whereas in England children are taught to call it aitch, in Ireland they learn to call it haitch, in fact aspirating the name of the aspirate. Thus an English child is taught to spell “hat,” aitch, aye, tee, “hat”—a contradiction in sound— while the Irish child learns to spell it, haitch, aye, tee, “hat,” which is philosophically correct, and he consequently early acquires a habit of aspirating in the proper place. I would strongly advise all teachers to instruct their pupils to call the aspirate by its proper name, haitch.
— Charles William Smith (professor of elocution.) 1866
Great quote!
My paternal grandmother always complained about the use of ‘haitch’, despite her having an Irish Catholic mother and living in what is now the Republic of Ireland during the 1930s and 40s.
In Irish the letter is called ‘heis’ (pronounced ‘hesh’) and aspiration (or lenition) is a feature of the language, which has influenced Hiberno-English. As Unionists in Northern Ireland have traditionally been wary of the language, hence it being seldom taught in Protestant schools, this would have increased their aversion to ‘haitch’.
Growing up in Singapore, I found ‘haitch’ was the norm among Singaporeans, as well as Malaysians – in Malay, it’s called ‘hec’ (pronounced ‘hetch’). In Indonesian, it’s called ‘ha’, as in Dutch, and Dutch speakers of English also aspirate it as ‘haitch’.
In Romanian, unlike most other Romance languages ‘h’ is not silent, perhaps due to Turkish and Hungarian influence, even with Latin-derived words, so ‘hiperactiviate’ is ‘heeper-aktivi-ta-te’.
Slavic, I would say; the h is [x], not [h].
BTW, hyper is Ancient Greek; the Latin version is super.
Ken Westmoreland: Romanian “h” is indeed not silent, but it isn’t an instance of Latin “h” surviving into Romanian. Indeed Latin “h” was lost in all Romance languages without exception: hence Romanian OM from Latin HOMO. Languages which spell cognates of this word with an “h”, such as French (homme) or Spanish (hombre) do so through the influence of Latin spelling.
The Romanian [x] phoneme, now spelled with “h”, was introduced into Romanian at a much later date, and indeed if you find any word of Latin origin spelled with an “h” which is sounded in Romanian, I guarantee that the word was not inherited in Romanian from Latin (the way “om” was), but borrowed from Latin (either directly or by way of some other language).
David Marjanović thanks for that – I did wonder about Slavic influence, and ‘x’ represents a ‘kh’ sound in Cyrillic alphabets as well as the IPA. Yes, the etymology of ‘hyper-‘ is Ancient Greek, but words with the prefix were assimilated into Late Latin, like ‘hyperbole’.
Etienne, I was talking about languages being Latin-derived in the general sense, not vocabulary inherited from Latin, or from Greek through Late Latin.
Words beginning in ‘hiper-‘ in Romanian are neologisms borrowed from French, but seeing as the initial ‘h’ in French is silent I thought it would have been transliterated accordingly, and dispensed with completely in Italian.
If not, I stand corrected. 🙂
Well I think it’s aitch but everyone that lives in the area say haitch which is silly!
The micro-tragedy Eno et Ikaël quoted in one of Pushkin’s letters from the 1830s (often said to be written by Pushkin himself, but Google gives an attestation from an 1825 book; I have no idea what the true origin is) attests a name of the letter H pronounced identically to hache “axe”.
Ironically enough, I myself would probably write “a HSE” even though I’m firmly in the “aitch” category – somehow, in mental pronunciation, the Russian “kha” overshadows the English “aitch”.
(The acronym is familiar to me, incidentally, but probably not in the context intended in the OP.)
You mean the h aspiré was still pronounced in 1825?
You mean the h aspire was still pronounced in 1825?
I mean it probably already wasn’t, since apparently in the respective dialects those two words are a minimal pair.
I must have missed this thread.
* I’ve never heard the letter R pronounced as ‘or’ in Australia. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced like ‘are’.
* As far as I know ‘haitch’ is very common in Australia, at least in NSW and Queensland. I have always used it (alternating with ‘aitch’) and I knew lots of people around me who did, too. As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I heard it on a telephone message for a government department over the Christmas break, where the name of a building using the letter H was pronounced as ‘haitch’. If it finds its way into messages like this, it can’t be too rare.
David M, January: a name of the letter H pronounced identically to hache “axe”
This would be true whether the letter h was sounded as [h] or not.
You mean the h aspiré was still pronounced in 1825?
Read the earlier comments on this thread. The loss or maintenance of [h] was not uniform throughout France, let alone in other francophone regions.
Etienne: Latin “h” was lost in all Romance languages without exception
Wasn’t it lost from Latin much earlier than when the language split into the varieties of Romance?
Turning to the Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s “national dictionary”:
– H is given the pronunciation /eıtʃ/ with a remark that /heıtʃ/ is non-standard
– R is pronounced /a/
– Z is /zɛd/
I recognized the name of the thread and figured I didn’t need to read what I had already read years ago. I was wrong.
When coming upon an old interesting thread I read the whole thing and sometimes discover I had posted a comment (sometimes even more than one). Other times there is something I had not noticed at the time. So rereading the thread is not time wasted.
So they say, but the Macquarie began life as a second-rate American dictionary. Noetica memorably denounced its pronunciations in particular (which were intended to accommodate Broad, General, and Cultivated pronunciations simultaneously) in these pages as “not worth a knob of goatshit”.
Marie-Lucie: if you mean that /h/ was lost in spoken Latin before the fall of the Western Empire (i.e. 476 A.D.) you’re probably right: one argument in favor of such an early loss is the fact that no trace/reflex of /h/ can be found in any of the Latin loanwords which made their way from spoken Latin to other languages spoken within the Empire (Albanian, Basque, Brythonic, Greek, Berber…).
Now, I think the evidence indicates that there already (before the fall of the Empire) was some diversification within spoken Latin which much later surfaced when the Romance languages were first written down, so I would not say that /h/ was lost before the Romance languages arose: but scholars who regard the rise of the Romance as postdating the fall of the Empire (they seem to make up a majority of scholars who have looked into the issue) would certainly agree with you.
Merci Etienne.
During the Empire, the Imperial administration must have been at the origin of many documents written in a more or less official standardized version of Latin even if at the local level some people among the conquered states spoke more diversified versions in addition to their own languages. After the fall and disintegration of the Western Empire, there was no longer such a written model (apart from that of the Church, kept up among the clergy but in a more plebeian version than the Imperial one) and local differences would have started to be more obvious in any written documents although perhaps not yet representing markedly different local forms of speech.
Baldi (Foundations of Latin p. 291) says that (in the Classical period) [h] was “a sociolinguistic marker of the upper classes”, something which usually indicates a deliberate archaism and is unlikely to survive major social disruptions such as the end of the Western Empire.
Almost all the details on the history of /h/ in Latin. Some prehistory, too.
Let’s not be too harsh on the Macquarie Dictionary. Yes, it has been taken up by proud nationalistic Australians — even the Australian government — who have no idea of its background. But it does generally try to represent local usage.
H is given the pronunciation /eıtʃ/ with a remark that /heıtʃ/ is non-standard
The fact that quite a few Australians, who are as prone to peevery (often misguided peevery) as any other Anglo-Saxon country, regard /heıtʃ/ as non-standard does not mean that it is not widespread. By going out of its way to list that pronunciation (and stigmatise it as non-standard) the dictionary only betrays how widespread it is.
“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.” —Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Concrete example: AJP defending the name Kevin.
You may argue something you have complete confidence in if other people deny that same thing.
Concrete examples: (1) people may have to argue that the earth is round, and mountains are not the stumps of giant silicon-based trees, (2) that the Bronze-Age Egyptians did not colonize the Americas because Bronze-Age Egypt had smallpox and the Americas definitely did not have smallpox until the Spanish, (3) that it’s not inappropriate to call people neo-Nazis if they chant anti-Jewish slogans and march under Nazi flags, unless they’re actors playing neo-Nazis.
Argue, yes, but not fanatically. Flat-earthers are fanatics, round-earthers are not.
David M, thanks for the definitive (I suppose) statements about Latin h.
The Macquarie Dictionary has also been adopted by the Australian legal and judicial profession as a tool in determining the “ordinary” meaning of words, as opposed to their technical legal meaning or their statutorily defined meaning. This occurs in situations if you want to show in court how a particular word should be interpreted, for example, in a contract or in legislation.
The Macquarie Dictionary has also been adopted by the Australian legal and judicial profession as a tool in determining the “ordinary” meaning of words
Indeed it has. That doesn’t mean it’s especially good. To be honest, I think the Australians are so eager to assert their separate national identity that they’ll take anything that has the label “Australian”. In this case they have possibly been sold a pig in a poke, even if it does wear lipstick.
Argue, yes, but not fanatically. Flat-earthers are fanatics, round-earthers are not
The flat-earthers just need to be smugger.
For me somebody like Richard Dawkins is a full-on fanatic although I’m sure he’s mostly right about stuff.
By going out of its way to list that pronunciation (and stigmatise it as non-standard) the dictionary only betrays how widespread it is
OT I’m gratified to see I’m not alone in finding the term “non-standard” to be stigmatising.
For me somebody like Richard Dawkins is a full-on fanatic
He’s fanatical about atheism (very much a minority opinion in places like the U.S.) but not about his other opinions that I know of.
He’s not a fanatic, he’s just an upper-class twit. 🙂
Living in Australia for three years, my experience is that “haitch” as in HR is fairly common, even among professionals.
I was watching the “Great Australian Spelling Bee” on TV the other night. (It was on Diva, one choice of channel available on cable here in Mongolia.)
I noticed the kids were saying ‘haitch’. I think it’s pretty widespread in Australia, one of two standard pronunciations, possibly the most widespread pronunciation.
From an article today by RTÉ, the national broadcaster:
The [sic] is from RTÉ, not me or Kevin Reilly.
Nice find!