Photo source: Fernando Gallego / Unspash.com
The French h: The letter that cannot decide whether to act like a vowel or a consonant.
Why is the sport shown in the photo known as "le handball" and not "l'handball"?
In September 2021, President Macron made a speech in which he made an appeal to the Harki people for forgiveness. If you had listened to the speech, your first thought might have been to wonder who the Harki people were; if you had read it, you might have wondered how to read the word out loud.
The answers to the first question is that they were the native Muslim Algerians who served as auxiliaries in the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, to whom Monsieur Macron was apologising on behalf of the French republic, for failing to adequately recognise their contribution at the time, and in the aftermath of the war.
As for the second question, the word begins with an ‘H’, which even an elementary student of French knows is always silent. Right? Well yes, but did you know that there are two different types of ‘silent h’ in French?
This is one example of an ‘h aspiré – an aspirated h’ which means that the ‘—s’ of les is not elided and is therefore silent. There is a tiny gap between the two words:
« Les. Harkis. »
Why is this?
The French words for hockey and hiccups sound the same: le hockey and le hoquet.
The more interesting thing than being mere homophones of each other, however, is why you don’t use the l + apostrophe, as you would for l’hôpital or l’histoire.
So, the h aspiré which does its best to behave like a proper consonant, and the h muet, which may as well not be there at all.
The “aspirated h” is a misnomer
“H aspiré” is a misnomer, because it makes it sound like the h at the beginning of a French word should be pronounced, but it is not. However, it is different from the more normal silent h, the “h muet” in that it does not allow elisions or liaisons – the h behaves like a consonant.
Par exemple : Je harnache les hérissons. – I harness the hedgehogs. [Please find a way of letting me know if ever you use this example sentence in real life!]
· Because harnacher begins with an h aspiré, there is no elision with je. If it were h muet, you’d have to write it with an apostrophe, as in j’ai or j’aime, but it would be wrong to write (or say) j’harnache.
· Likewise, les hérissons is pronounced /leh erisson/, not lehz-erisson/ as it would be if hérisson started with h muet.
So, the initial h on a French word is never actually pronounced, but there are many words where it acts strongly enough to be taken notice of, if I can put it like that. The following is a long-ish, but by no means comprehensive list of French words that start with h aspiré. You will notice that many of them are loan words from other languages. As they begin with h aspiré rather than h muet, the pronunciation stays slightly more faithful to that of the original language.
Here's a list of many (not quite all) French words where the h is the aspirated one:
It's quite neat that la hache (the axe) is on this list as it gives us an aide-mémoire for how to pronounce the letter h in French, although the letter is masculine: le h.
Andrew Wenger, SameSky Languages.
Our lessons start up again in September. There are currently places in most of our French groups, which go from low-intermediate to advanced level. Please contact me here if you would like to find out about joining a class
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