The battered letter hache. The ninth letter of the Spanish alphabet is undoubtedly the most discriminated against, as well as the favorite victim of those who write ignoring the rules. The reason for this spelling bullying is that h is the only letter that does not represent a sound, which leads to its absence in many words; the compound verb forms formed with the verb to have hurt especially; “e ido”, “abrá venido”… The opposite also happens, that an h is added when it does not touch: there is above all the “I miss you” or the preposition “a” mistakenly converted into a verb (“me I’m going to buy”), not to mention the confusion between having and seeing or between there is, there and ay. With this scenario, no one is surprised that search engines are full of queries regarding whether or not a word has h. As an example, this button: hermitage or hermitage, how do you spell it?
Surely most people who search for “how to spell hermitage or hermitage” do so referring to the small chapel located in sparsely populated places and, following the definition of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), which do not usually have worship permanent. In this case, hermitage is written without a h, since it is a word that comes from the late Latin eremita (and this in turn from the Greek eremites), which means hermit.
However, it may be that in some very very specific context it should be written hermitage with an ax. And it is that the herma is a type of sculpture, a bust without arms placed on a pillar called a stipe. It receives that name because in Ancient Greece the work generally represented the god Hermes. In this way, if someone wanted to use the diminutive of herma to indicate a sculpture of reduced dimensions, they could write hermita.
If we delve into the RAE’s Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, we find some more curiosity about the hache. To begin with, the article that precedes the term hash is one of the exceptions to the rule that requires the use of the masculine definite article before feminine nouns that begin with tonic “a”. The, the hache; unlike: the eagle, the water or the bird.
Likewise, the dictionary of doubts recalls that the h was not always silent, since until the middle of the 16th century it was pronounced in a similar way to how the English aspirated h is pronounced today, specifically when it came from the Latin initial f. “This aspiration is still preserved as a dialect trait in Andalusia, Extremadura, the Canary Islands and other areas of Spain and America”, sometimes with a sound similar to that of the letter j.
However, we do pronounce the aspirated h in certain words, such as hamster, holding, hashish or Hawaii, but this is so because they are foreign words (from English, German or Arabic) that we use regularly in Spanish.
The Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts lists two more groups of words in which the H is not completely silent. On the one hand, the terms that “contain the diphthongs ua, ue, ui in initial position or in interior position at the beginning of the syllable, and that are written with h before” (hua-, hue-, hui-), are usually pronounced before the diphthong a slight consonantal sound close to a g: hueso [guéso], huevo [guébo], parihuela [pariguéla], dehuesar [desguesár].
And then there are the words that start with the group hi followed by a stressed “e”, which are pronounced like the voiced palatal sound “y”, “except after a pause or a word ending in a vowel, where the pronunciation oscillates between [ié] and [yé]”; iron [yérro], ice [yélo], grass [yerba]. In some cases, in fact, this pronunciation has ended up being fixed in writing, such as yerba or yedra (ivy).
To finish, a brief review of the spelling rules for the letter h, as proposed by the Fundación del Español Urgente (Fundéu) in its series of basic doubts:
The Fundéu also offers a list of homophone words, which sound the same but have different meanings and can be written differently, in which the letter h is involved:
According to the criteria of The Trust Project