The Humble H: A Small Yet Essential Building Block of Language
The letter H – the eighth letter of the English alphabet. It is a simple letter with one vertical stem and three horizontal bars. Despite its seemingly basic appearance, the letter H is critical for speech, words, and language.
Without the letter H, homophones would run rampant, wreaking havoc on clarity and comprehension. Consider some well-known examples: “our” and “hour” or “there”, “they’re”, and “their”. These words have distinct meanings but are pronounced identically. It is only through spelling, distinguished by the presence or absence of H, that they convey different ideas. H differentiation also enables us to differentiate similar terms like where and were, hole and whole, and so on.