| 词组 | h |
| 释义 | h • Hear them down in Soho Square, dropping aitches ev'rywhere, Speaking English any way they like. —Alan Jay Lerner, "Why Can't the English?" In My Fair Lady, 1956 The pattern that elicited this plaint from Professor Higgins was the familiar Cockney one, a pattern not found in the United States. The emotion with which the question was fraught sprang from the fact that, in England, A-dropping is the verbal class distinction par excellence. In America, on the other hand, although there is one pattern in which \\\\h\\\\ is normally dropped by some people and not by others, the variation does not correlate so starkly with social class. The pattern in question is that of \\\\h\\\\ before the semivowels \\\\w\\\\ and \\\\y\\\\, as in when or human. Some educated people say \\\\'hwen\\\\ and \\\\hyü-man\\\\, others— probably the majority—say \\\\'wen\\\\ and \\\\yü-man\\\\ (Strictly speaking, what we transcribe as \\\\hw\\\\ and \\\\hy\\\\ are not literally \\\\h\\\\ followed by a semivowel, but a single sound that we may call a voiceless version of that semivowel. The distinction is unimportant for this discussion, however.) The \\\\'wen\\\\ style has long prevailed in southern England, home territory of standard British English, and cannot be regarded as incorrect, though it is under persistent pressure from the spelling. In America, \\\\hw-\\\\ gets an additional boost from the admixture of the northern strand of English speech where \\\\hw-\\\\ did not die out. Accordingly, in this country, when language is put under a lens, the \\\\'wen\\\\ style sometimes appears in an invidious light, as when Ring Lardner suggests the semi-educated vernacular of one of his characters by making him say • She was playing bridge w'ist with another gal and two dudes —The Big Town, 1921 All the same, it is entirely standard. Another subclass of A-words may be defined not pho-nologically but etymologically: those borrowed from French, the h not being pronounced in the lender language. In many of these, \\\\h\\\\ has been added at the suggestion of the spelling: the \\\\h\\\\ we now pronounce in hotel, habit, heritage, etc., is an innovation. In others, the \\\\h\\\\-less pronunciation persists—hour, honor, honest, heir, etc.—though here too there have been struggles, as Charles Lamb attests: • Martin Burney is as odd as ever. We had a dispute about the word 'heir' which I contended was pronounced like 'air'—he said that it might be in common parlance, or that we might so use it, speaking of the 'Heir at Law' a comedy, but that in the Law Courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, & to say Hayer—he thought it might even vitiate a cause, if a Counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion he 'would consult Sergeant Wilde'—who gave it against him. Sometimes he falleth into the water, sometimes into the fire —letter, 24 May 1830 In the case of herb (from French herbe \\\\erb\\\\), the battle fell out differently in different ages and areas: • "When my Father was a boy every well-brought-up Canadian child learned that 'herb' was pronounced without the 'h'; you still hear it now and again, and modern Englishmen think it's ignorance" — Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels, 1981 The situation today is: Americans normally do not pronounce the \\\\h\\\\, Englishmen normally do, and Canadians are divided. Canadian phonology in general matches the American much more nearly than it does the British, but anglophone Canadians tend to follow Britian's lead on individual lexical shibboleths like herb and schedule. Finally, vehicle (from French véhicule) is in anomalous position: the most widespread pronunciation and the one most often recommended is without \\\\h\\\\, but the \\\\h\\\\ variant, far from smacking of book-learning, strikes some as rustic, especially if the middle syllable is stressed, so that this version seems to them doubly a "hick" pronunciation. This \\\\h\\\\ variant is discussed at greater length at vehicle. See also a, an. |
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