Aspirated h

In French spelling, aspirated "h" (French: h aspiré) is an initial silent letter that represents a hiatus at a word boundary, between the word's first vowel and the preceding word's last vowel. At the same time, the aspirated h stops the normal processes of contraction and liaison from occurring.[1]

The name of the now-silent h refers not to a contemporary aspiration but to its former pronunciation as the voiceless glottal fricative [h] in Old French and in Middle French.[citation needed]

  1. ^ Fagyal, Zsuzsanna (2006). French: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 65–66, 224, 275–276. ISBN 0-521-52896-8.