tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed May 28 09:19:04 2003

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RE: the glottal stop

>I use a glottal stop.  I was never taught to use a pure vowel.  As I
>understand we leave the "h" off these words because of their French
>heritage.  Which begs the question, do the French say a pure vowel for a
>word that begins with "h"?  When I was a fluent speaker of French, I'm
>sure I used a glottal stop, but I never paid enough attention to notice
>if native speakers used a glottal stop there (in fact, I didn't know
>what a glottal stop was at that time).  Anyone out there able to comment
>on this?

I am not a native speaker, but I minored in French in college, and I have 
been complimented on my pronunciation by native speakers, and vowels in 
isolation do indeed have a glottal stop in French.  In fact, there a words 
that are spelled with 'h' that actually start with a glottal stop.  This 
phenomenon is called 'aspirate h'.  For example, "heure" (hour) starts with 
a vowel sound, and will elide with the definite article: "l'heure".  The 
word "haricot", (green bean), on the other hand, starts with a glottal stop, 
and does not elide: "le haricot".  My French-English dictionary even uses am 
apostrophe in the phonetic spelling for words with an aspirate h.

However, words with a non-aspirate h and words with a vowel do insert a 
glottal stop in isolation, or at the beginning of a phrase, and I believe 
they also do if the previous word ends in a vowel.  I believe that, 
technically speaking, you're supposed to pronounce the glottal stop in all 
positions for words with an aspirate h, but in practice, I generally only 
hear it between the definite article and the word.  That is, with the 
indefinite article, "un haricot", I generally hear only an n and not a 
glottal stop.

The h (both aspirate and non-aspirate) is an orthographic remnant.  The 
letter was pronounced in Latin (at least, it was in classical Latin - I'm 
not sure about medieval church Latin), and was retained in the spelling even 
after the pronunciation changed.  I'm not sure what phonetic qualities or 
environment caused some h's to become aspirate and not others.  One of my 
former professors specialized in medieval French, and if I can find his 
email, I can ask him, if anyone is really interested.

qatlh "France" Hol'e' maja'chuq?

-Sangqar

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