If you’ve taken some basic French classes, you’ll probably remember being taught that the h It is not pronounced in French. So hour (“time, hour”) and eur (the name of a French river and department) are pronounced identically. You were probably taught then that a word beginning with h behaves as if it started with a vowel so that, for example, “the time” is timeNo *The time, just as “water” is Water and not *water. And in threeyes hours (“three hours, three o’clock”), the yes the following vowel is pronounced before, just as it would be in threeyes trees (“three trees”).
But it turns out that this is not the whole story. It is true that in standard French, the h it is always “silence”. But in a few words, the h still represents a special “feature”: it counts as a consonant when deciding whether to pronounce the yes (or another consonant) that comes before it, and also when deciding whether to use she gold YO’ (gold of).
So how does this work? Well, the masculine words hero (“hero”) and sea urchin (“hedgehog”) are examples of these special words. Looking at them, you may have expected that the French for “the hero” and “the hedgehog” would be *the hero and *the Hedgehog. But in these cases, the words behave as if they really started with a consonant, even though the h it is “silent”, and so say the francophones the hero and the Hedgehog. If you have heard of the movie. Hateyou may have wondered why it is not hate. Good, hate (“hate”) is one of these special words!
Linguists call this phenomenon “aspirating h” gold “h aspirated” (this misleading term derives from the fact that, in the history of language, the h was pronounced or “aspirated” in some of these words). Other common examples with an “aspirate h” include: the ax (“axis”), hatred (“coverage”), the village (“Village”), herring (“herring”), chance (“chance, luck, destiny”), lobster (“lobster”), shame (“shame”) along with eight (“eight”), high (“tall stature”). So in the expression aloft (“at the top, above”), the word is not pronounced No because high has a “sucked” h“. (In eighteenas you probably know, the X pronounced: “di-z-(h)uit”.)
There are some other complications with these words. One particular difficulty is that there is some variation from speaker to speaker as to which words receive an “aspirate”. This is what some speakers will say the bean (“the bean”) while others the bean; some will say The dutch (“the Dutchman”) while others The dutch.
It also turns out that the so-called “aspirated h“the word doesn’t even have to be spelled with a letter h! Words eleven and yoghurt (“yogurt”), and often foreign words beginning with a vowel all behave as if they began with an “aspirate”. h“, and so you say for example 11 of September, yoghurtand the yes is not pronounced in the eleven people, the yogurt(s) (While noting that it is in HEyes eyes). These special cases are generally words that start with a “glide” or semi-vowel. They can be written with a ‘w’, ‘y’, or a combination of what are traditionally classified as “vowel” letters. Other examples include the iambo, the wadding, yoga, western, the wiki…
We have given a brief overview here of what is actually quite a complex area of French pronunciation. If you’re a relative beginner, it pays to be aware of this phenomenon without getting bogged down. Advanced students will have fun dealing with the complexities…