As illustrated by Coulmas, there is no causal relation between the presence of the phoneme /h/ and the one of the grapheme <h>:
Consider, for instance, Latin-derived words such as habit, heretic, hotel and hospital in English where the initial <h> is pronounced, although it had already ceased to be pronounced in Middle French whence these words were borrowed. Some frequently used words like hour are still pronounced without the /h/, despite the spelling. But the others are evidence that writing had become an agent of linguistic change, transcending its role as a means of expression. The image became the model. (quote from F. Coulmas, "Writing Systems", CUP, 2003) "History" may very well be one of these words which were pronounced without the /h/ phoneme in Middle French when passed over to English, and then re-acquired the /h/ phoneme because of their spelling. So much for the Saussurean primacy of spoken language… > Le 20 août 2022 à 11:47, Jens Bakker <jbak...@jbakker.de> a écrit : > > May be, this is a misunderstanding by some teachers who do pronounce it > „istory“ or a joke by some students, in English this word is pronounced with > an „h“, and therefore it seems to be impossible to write it without an „h“ > but to pronounce it with an „h“ at the beginning of the word, according to > the customs of English orthography. <http://www.imt-atlantique.fr/> Yannis HARALAMBOUS Professor Computer Science Department UMR CNRS 6285 Lab-STICC <https://www.imt-atlantique.fr/en/person/yannis-haralambous> <https://twitter.com/y_haralambous> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannis-haralambous-5529073?trk=hp-identity-name>Technopôle Brest-Iroise CS 83818 29238 Brest Cedex 3, France Une École de l'IMT <http://www.imt.fr/> I recall a workshop in which Pat Hayes proposed a fine of $1000 for every researcher who invents a new logic. (Murray Shanahan, Solving the frame problem)
