HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH H.

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH H.

There is something startling in the announcement that were William Shakespeare to hear one of his plays read by a good speaker of our own day, it would be less intelligible to him than if spoken in the Somersetshire dialect. So great is the change in English pronunciation. This fact prepares us for the discovery that great alterations have taken place in the significance of individual letters; and that the phonetic value of letter H has changed also.

Dr Johnson, in 1755, wrote: “Grammarians of the last age directed thatanshould be used before H, whence it appears that the English anciently aspirated less.”

“The great Doctor uttered many hasty things.”—

Thackeray.

Thackeray.

Thackeray.

Thackeray.

Dr Johnson’s suppressed premiss is negatived by his ownprotégé, Goldsmith, in whose writingsanoccurs before every variety of H; a fact which shows thatanand the Aspirate were not generally considered to be incompatibles. That their juxtaposition does not of itself offend themodern ear, may be proven by uttering the words “than have” and “they have,” in which the Aspirate is heard to follow thenand the vowel-sound with equal grace and fluency. There are, moreover, many reasons for entertaining an opinion directly opposed to that expressed by the great lexicographer; and for believing the powers of the English H to have been steadily on the decline since the days of primitive English. In all Aryan languages, H has a tendency to mollify and decay; and its powers are always found to be most strongly marked in Germanic tongues that are in nearest historical relation with their common Teutonic ancestor.

Inductively, one is led to believe that the English Aspirate is less strong than formerly. This belief will acquire support from the following argument:—

It will be remembered that prior to the introduction of terminal rhymes, the laws of Prosody were based upon principles slightly different from those of to-day; our ancestors, preferring an identity of consonant-sounds to an assonance of vowels, required that syllables to rhyme shouldbeginwith the same letter—thesystem being known asALLITERATION. If we bear in mind how much must have depended on the distinctness and strength of the alliterative rhymes of early verse, where the metrical management and rhythmical cadence were far from being irreproachable, we shall readily concede that the bard will have selected for his use the strongest and most distinct rhymes that the language could supply. “Rhymes to the eye,” as they are called, would have been utterly useless, from the fact of poetry being then composed for oral rendering, and the hearers generally ignorant of spelling. It is, therefore, agreeable to reason to conclude that all sounds employed in alliterative rhyming were distinctly audible, strong, and emphatic. Now, on looking over alliterative verses of the seventh to thirteenth centuries, one cannot fail to be struck by the frequent occurrence of rhymed H’s: their proportion being, in many poems, in excess of that of any other letter. Modern poets, it is true, have not unfrequently pressed H into service as an alliterative rhyme, but in so doing they have afforded ample proof of the inefficiency of the modern English Aspirate, when acting in that capacity. One of the best specimens ofmodern alliterative H-rhymes is that in one of Moore’s American poems:—

“And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world,Aheart that ishumble mighthope for ithere.’”

“And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world,Aheart that ishumble mighthope for ithere.’”

“And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world,Aheart that ishumble mighthope for ithere.’”

“And I said, ‘If there’s peace to be found in the world,

Aheart that ishumble mighthope for ithere.’”

But the alliteration is scarcely appreciable, unless the rendering be accompanied by undue aspiratory efforts. Whenever we hear a run of words rhyming alliteratively in H, it is highly probable that only half the pleasure we experience is conveyed to us by ear, and that the other half is of a subjective nature, and arises from ourknowingthe letter H to enter into the formation of the words, and the alliteration would be almost lost to us were we ignorant of their orthography. Hence, it is rather from an association of ideas, than from an effect produced on the organs of hearing, that we derive the pleasure; and the modern H, indicating as it does merely a like modification in the phonation of the several vowels to which it is prefixed, cannot be regarded as having adistinct soundof its own, nor, consequently, as constituting a perfect alliterative rhyme. Do not the mute H’s of the following words give results nearly as satisfactory as the H’s in the above quotation?—

Theheir that ishonest willhonour thehour!

Theheir that ishonest willhonour thehour!

Theheir that ishonest willhonour thehour!

Theheir that ishonest willhonour thehour!

Considering, then, the faintness and the nature of the Aspirate of to-day, and its insufficiency for purposes of alliteration, we seem at liberty to conclude that the Anglo-Saxon and Early English H, so much affected of the early poets, was stronger than our own, and had, in all probability, retained much of the pristine power of its Teutonic harshness.

That the sound of the Anglo-Saxon H bore a resemblance to that of an unvocalizedy(see page37), is made manifest by the free interchange ofhandyin ancient MSS. The substitution of surds for sonants, andvice versâ, is common to the early stages of the development of all orthographical codes.

Mr Ellis, whose researches have thrown great light on these matters, gives as his opinion—

In Anglosaxon, a finalhwas equal to thechof loch, or German dach. In the thirteenth century the sound ofHseems to have been very uncertain, and in the fourteenth it was lost in those words before which a vowel was elided. In the sixteenth it was pronounced or not, differently from the present custom.[4]

There exists a belief—perhaps on no very firm foundation—that the Normans could not, or would not, aspirate their H’s; and the ideagains some support in the period of decadence of the strong English H having commenced subsequently to the Norman invasion. It is, however, not easy to understand how these Norsemen should have learned to entirely abandon the use of H in consequence of a century and a half’s residence in Neustria. Salesbury, a Welsh linguist, exhumed by Mr Ellis, implies moreover that, as late as the sixteenth century, the French still aspirated at leastsomeof their H’s, and Littré, in his admirable dictionary, declares the Norman Aspirate to be in a state of good preservation (“très-nettement conservé”) in our own day. The old Norse H had been, according to Rask, Grimm, and Ellis, a vigorous and thriving aspirate; Rapp gives it as having been equal tokh. But presuming that, prior to the Invasion, the Normans had become droppers of H’s, would enable one to account for the unsettled state of the English H in the thirteenth century, when English reappeared as a national speech (1258). Also, according to this latter view, a habit of not aspirating would have been greatly in vogue for a time, and for a Saxon to have dropped his H’s would have been equivalent to an announcement of good breeding and aristocratic acquaintances, or of his beingin the habit of frequenting the court and other haunts of the Norman nobility. But when the language of the vanquished began to overcome that of the conqueror, the Aspirate must have entered upon a new era, and H’s again have prevailed in the land. Still the new H had not the vigour of the old one—the guttural of the Anglo-Saxon. In the fourteenth century, as mentioned by Mr Ellis, its employment was subject to various rules; and this will have probably been the period during which the first mute H’s received public recognition, being tolerated as a sort of compromise or concession made to an aristocracy little partial to H’s. Throughout the remaining centuries there have been rules of some sort governing—though very laxly—the employment of the Aspirate. But the powers of H were gradually, surely, and steadily waning, until, at length, its strong guttural sound finally and completely evanesced towards the latter half of last century.

Presuming that the reader consents to recognise the antique origin, the unbroken line of descent, and the rough, sturdy ancestry of our English H, it may be interesting to notice that in 1847 appeared the second edition of a critical work on the English Language,[5]written inGerman (by a fellow of Cambridge), purporting among other things to prove to the omniscient Teuton, that in England the aspiration of H’s is altogether a modern invention, a fanciful outcome of recent orthoepical dogmatism; and that by good speakers it is practically ignored. Concerning this writer, Mr Ellis says, “His principal argument is the retention ofan,mine,thine, &c., before words beginning with H, in the authorised version of 1611. The lists of words with mute H given by Palgrave, Salesbury, &c., were of course unknown to him. If, however, he had been aware of the loose manner in which H is inserted and omitted in Layamon, the ‘Genesis and Exodus,’ Prisoner’s Prayer, and other writings of the thirteenth century, he would doubtless have considered his point established. In practice, I understand from a gentleman who conversed with him, he omitted the H altogether.”

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