Additional Illuminated letter "H"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.
H (named aitch /ˈeɪtʃ/ or haitch /ˈheɪtʃ/ in Ireland and parts of Australasia and the United Kingdom; plural aitches or haitches) is the 8th letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
The Semitic letter 'ח' ('ê') most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.
The Greek eta 'Η' in Archaic Greek alphabets still represented /h/ (later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/). In this context the letter eta is also known as heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets the letter heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/.
Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme but almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighboring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of /ʀ/. 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch' which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish, Galician, Old Portuguese and English, /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, /x/ in German, Czech language, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English and a few loanwords into English, and /ç/ in German. Read more . . .
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