Cool question. I don't know an answer, but may I add that I have heard people pronouncing the word "White" as "H-wite". Another H thing. On the uvver 'and, I 'ave 'eard people in Hengland hignore Haitches altogevver, like Ali G. Erm. I fink i iz confuzed.

One small voice: I would pronounce the 'h' as you're describing.

Maybe your students just said it was an American thing because they were a bit 'lazy' to take care how they pronounce words. And I guess students know that even many British don't know how grammar, pronounciation etc. are used in America, so it would be a perfect excuse. In school I had an Irish English-teacher (IMO she was really great) and she didn't know the differences either...

Ich war ein jahr in den staaten (kalifornien) und auch da hat man das h in human in etwa wie das deutsche ch ausgesprochen. was du beschrieben hast ist das sog. H-dropping, das eine regionale besonderheit sowohl in den staaten als auch in großbritannien darstellt (in den staaten oft im süden oder in unterengesellschaftsschichten). i hope this helps.

I learned it the way that the "h" should be mute in this word. Interesting to learn that this was wrong.

I think you are right about maybe it's being used as a lazy excuse. Thing is the teacher says something like 'I'm sure the Americans don't pronounce the 'h", then they go up to one of their students who has spent a year or two in America on some programme and get them to pronounce it, then they say it without pronouncing the 'h' (which still sounds wrong to me even in an American accent), so the teacher turns to me and says "see, told you, it's just an American thing", or the students say "hey, ich red' doch kein Britisches Englisch, ich red' Amerikanisch, da sprech ich das 'h' eben nicht aus". I want to be able to tell them it's still wrong though. I'll have to start listening to more US English! Await further comments!!

Well, we're all 'uman.

I have heard my german collueges say 'enkel' instead of 'ankle' or 'ecktion' instead of 'action', 'menchester' instead of 'manchester' and 'bleck-beary' instead of 'blackberry'.
Zey alvays inzisst zat dat iss Korrekt ! Bat ei em nott konfinsst !

MW kennt sowohl "chuman" und "chuge" als auch "yuman" und "yuge".

I had too many German, English, US, Irish, Scottish and Canadian English teachers with Egg-yolk in their beards to know what's right or wrong anymore.
I pronounce human with a weak h and hope it bothers no-one, just as little as it bothers me when people talk funny. The most important thing to do while speaking is to get rid of the Knäckebrot in your cheeks first.

I've often heard Americans say "herb" without the initial aspirated "h"

Ich habe es in der Schule gelernt mit einem Laut irgendwo zwischen h und ch (wie in "ich") und verwende es seither so. Beschwert hat sich bisher keiner meiner angelsächsischen Bekannten und Verwandten (aus GB & AUS), die mich sonst gerne korrigieren bei meiner Aussprache.

Ich lebe nun schon eine Weile in den USA und ich habe schon alles moegliche gehoert. Sowohl das 'yuman' als auch das 'hyuman', und auch den 'uiskey' und andere den 'hwiskey'.
Das mag an regionalen oder soziologischen Unterschieden liegen, in keinem Fall versetzt es mich in die Lage, eindeutig zu bestimmen, was denn nun richtig oder falsch sei, geschweige denn hier im Forum die Behauptung aufzustellen "Hier in den USA wird das soundso ausgesprochen".

Im Zweifelsfalle finde ich bei Marriam-Webster http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Di....
nicht nur die Eintragungen im Dictionary oder Thesaurus, sondern eben auch ein Aussprachebeispiel. Ein click auf das Lautsprechersymbol genuegt.

There are a number of issues raised. Here are my observations on AE.

1. In standard AE, the "h" in huge, human, etc. is always pronounced. Yes, it can sound much like the ich-Laut, or it can be softer, but these words are always aspirated.
2. There is a regional variation in pronouncing the "h" in "herb". In contrast to BE, most Americans do not pronounce it (I don't) but some do. This is one of the relatively few words where the pronounciation of the initial "h" is optional. The name "Herb" is always aspirated.
3. There is a regional variation in aspirating the "w" in words spelled with "wh-", for example "white", "which", "whether", etc. Most Americans do aspirate the "w", but I for one (along with others with a New York accent) do not.

I think it does depend where in the U.S. you are, in the cases of "huge", "humid", etc. I personally know some folks who pronounce "humid" like "yoo-mid", although I find it rather annoying. Maybe this is a Midwest thing (although if you ask most people from Michigan, we "don't have an accent").

For my part, I pronounce "human" and "huge" as "hyuman" and "hyuge".

Fowler's Modern English Usage has an entry for "humour" which is interesting:

""the pronunciation of the 'h' is only of recent date, and is sometimes omitted" (OED 1899) This is still largely true, though the pronunciation with silent 'h' is more likely to be encountered in AmE than in BrE."

About the only time we actually leave off the 'h' completely is when we're faking some other accent (Minnesotan comes to mind...actually, British as well, but that's only because we don't have a clue what we're talking about...)

I've never heared the 'h' pronounced quite as strongly as you've mentioned, and I've certainly heard it very, very indistinct, but I would not say that Americans actually leave it off (unless it's a dialect from some place I've never been, and I've travelled most of the United States).

I'd say CHuman. Or chyuman. Swiss people do love their CH!
No, just kidding. Pronounciation is a rather personal issue. Just respect the speaker, and as long as you understand it as an English word, just let him say yooooomen.

Same goes with German and Swiss German (:

But Hanna, Michigan isn't in the Midwest anyway. : - )
No accent in Michigan, hah. But I'm just a transplanted troll from the real Midwest, so what do I know? Did you know that some people pronounce Yooper with an h and it sounds like hyooper?

@ Amy: Since when is Michigan not in the Midwest? *scratches head*

Hanna <AE>: It's an interesting phenomenon. Ask people (in or out of the Midwest) to name the states that are clearly in the Midwest or sort of borderline. There is no general agreement. I grew up in Iowa and most Iowans would say that Illinois is definitely Midwest, Indiana is borderline but Midwest, Ohio is questionably Midwest and Michigan definitely not. Also, I find the cultural differences between Michigan and say Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois to be quite noticeable. If I were living in Minnesota or Missouri, it would feel very homey (of course, a lot of Iowans escape to MN), but even though I've been in MI a long time, it does not seem Midwestern to me and the people have had very different experiences growing up. I went to Kansas City, though and it felt like home. Course, there are a lot of Iowans there, too. ;-)

@ initial topic.

Perhaps it's overcompensating as well.

The German students want to sound less German, so they don't pronounce the h as the ich-Laut?
You get the same phenomenon with the v, as in vase, which Germans very often pronounce like w in water, although the correct v is a phoneme of the German language and the w-sound is NOT.

Och Anja. Don't stick to much to Standard English.

Och Chuckie, where am I sticking to Standard English? I learned it in Michigan ;o)
Seriously.
And I always split infinitives...

By the way, Billie Joe Armstrong drops his aitches.
(And he's from California..)

Anyway, some Germans learn English pronunciation (also) by singing along to their favorite music... and a teacher won't stand much of a chance against that kind of influence.

Green day forever!

Michigan not in the midwest? At least the Wikipedia article is pretty clear on that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_Unite...

I think the 'standard' American pronounciation of 'human' is /hjumEn/, at least that's what the m-w speaker does. Personally, I would also think /jumEn/ sounds strange, but I'm not a native. The vast majority of the speakers (including me, I can't pronounce /hj/), though, palatalizes (i think that's the correct term) the /h/ which sounds somewhat like the German ch in ich. To quote wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palata...

> In some dialects of English, the sequence /hj/
> is sometimes realized as the voiceless
> palatal fricative, via coalescence, a type of
> assimilation. For example, human (/ˈhjumən/ might
> be realized as [ˈçumən]). However, there are
> no minimal pairs for /hj/ and /ç/, so
> the voiceless palatal fricative is not a
> separate phoneme in English.

The reason why whine and wine are different for some speakers is another one; they historically had different phonemes, but the distinction has been lost for most speakers. I don't think I can even produce the [M] sound and I think it is different from /hw/.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-cluster_reductions

Ok, here's another observation:
Germans tend to avoid the ich-sound in their own language.
they say "ick" (Berlin) for ich or simply "i" (down south)
or nit / net for nicht and nix for nichts...

worse yet when the sound is supposed to be initial.

They say kemie (instead of chemie) -- down south.
Or Schemie (as in Schule) around where I'm from...

Let's face it: it's a nasty sound -- who needs it?

But, as a teacher, if you totally dispair of your German students, show them
some Star Trek-Deep Space 9 (in English, of course) -- and have them imitate the way Quark says: "You /chju:mo:ns/"!

I think the main reason for the mistake is school. A lot of teachers tell their students that yooman is the correct "American" pronunciation. In the first two years, I was taught to pronounce the h, then in the following years I was told not to do that, so that now (being out of school for a long time) I have trouble to re-learn it with the h... Stupid school *grr*. The question why teachers don't know they're making a mistake is unanswerable, I think. Maybe the first one to introduce it had trouble with the sound and invented that lie in order not to look ridiculous...

@Thomas: Thanks for the link to the Wikipedia article. I didn't say that no one would say that Michigan is Midwest, just that there is not general agreement on the term. I personally would like someone go to the "Heartland" and tell the Heartlanders that West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania (gasp!) are Midwestern States (if pink). The faces and comments would be interesting. The US Census Bureau's East and West North Central States groupings are much more logical. Great Lakes States also makes sense.

@Anja

Ich fürchte, Deine Behauptung der CH Laut würde nicht verwendet, ist nicht richtig. (fürCHte, niCHt, riCHtig)

Teilweise gibt es sicherlich (ui, gleich zwei mal- und bei "gleich" auch) Varianten, die den Laut vermeiden- Chemie (so kenne ich es aus der Frankfurter Gegend) wird auch Kemie oder Schemie genannt. China ebenso Kina und Schina. Ich kann natürlich in Bayern zu "I woaß net", in Berlin zu "Icke dette kieke mol" und in der Pfalz zu "han isch doch sacht" verballhornt werden. Nichtsdestotrotz wäre es lächerlich zu behaupten der Laut würde gar nicht verwendet. Oftmals wird er sogar gebraucht wo eigentlich kein ch sondern ein g steht, so bei Käfig, richtig, lustig, etc.


And as for your comment "...it's a nasty sound, who needs it?", well, I for one need it, whenever my name is pronounced in German... ;)

I agree with all the other AE speakers that dropping the H in words like 'human' is *not* the normal American pronunciation. You might occasionally hear it, but I think most people would regard it either as nonstandard AE, even as a particularly unattractive habit, or as Cockney BE.

I'm not sure many speakers really palatalize it as much as the corresponding sound in German. I have the feeling that the articulation point may move forward slightly in English only occasionally for emphasis, but that's just a guess. I do know that telling English speakers to try to prolong the 'hu-' sound abnormally is a good way, perhaps even the only practical way, to teach the soft German CH. (Which, BTW, I think is a very attractive sound.)

Archfarchnad's quote from Fowler about 'humor(ous)' is interesting. Is that a particular exception, and if so, why? I ask because two AE speakers who happen to be, shall we say, closely related to me have persisted in saying 'yumor(ous)' as long as I've known them, even though their speech is normally educated in other respects and they certainly don't say 'yuman' or 'yuge' or 'Youston' or anything else. It drives me batty, and I'm certainly thankful I didn't inherit that gene, but they're too old and too stubborn to retrain and they keep swearing they're right. God forbid there should actually be evidence on their side. (-;

For me, substituting 'witch' for 'which' or 'wine' for 'whine' is simply sloppy, nonstandard pronunciation, but unfortunately it's very widespread in AE.

Yes, the witch/which, wine/whine thing is indeed very widespread in the US.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/maps/Ma...

Is anyone aware of sound samples of speakers that make the distinction? Or of a famous person that makes it?
I'd love to hear it, but unfortunately I don't think I could notice the distinction unless I listened very carefully (actually, I usually even perceive /v/ and /w/ as the same sound). If I ask people about that, all I usually get is funny looks or the claim that wine and whine have a slightly different vowel. Sound samples of the IPA /W/ character so strange that I don't believe anyone would pronounce 'whine' with this sound.

@hm--us: OK - maybe I'm getting defensive, but why do you think that not making the "witch/which" distinction is "sloppy"? It's just a feature of one's dialect (New York in my case). Is not making the "law/lore" distinction (another feature) also "sloppy"? Or what about the fact that we make a three-way distinction between "Mary/merry/marry" (also not standard AE); does that make us super-careful?

It's just a feature of the dialect of a large number of speakers, and rather than being "unfortunate", I think it should be treasured as one of the few dialectical distinctions that we have in the U.S.

@Thomas: The vast majority of Americans make this distinction, so you don't have to go very far to find examples. If you have American friends, don't ask for an explanation; --instead, just ask them to say "which witch?" or "why whine about wine?" etc. and you should hear the difference right off. (But if you have trouble hearing the difference between "w" and "v", you'll certainly find that the difference between "w" and "wh" is more subtle.)

m-w listed für Houston als Ausprache hyü-st&n oder 'yü-st&n. Die BBC scheint es in den Nachrichten aber immer 'chu-' auszusprechen, ist mir (beim Basteln in der Garage) jede Stunde wieder aufgefallen...

@Martin
I don't believe the claim that most speakers distinguish between them. In the map I linked to for example, only about 10% of the surveyed speakers made a clear distinction and I have never noticed it at all, so I'm not even sure whether I could really spot the difference if I walked up to people and bugged them about it.

@ Nica
Hey, teachers are only human, too! At least they finally learn to accept American English at all! (When I was in school, I was very lucky to have in a teacher in my English-LK who accepted my American spelling!)
We even had a teacher at our school (who had a Scottish wife) who insisted that the only correct pronunciation of English was the scottish...

There's just so many different ways of pronouncing English, as compared to, say, French.

To finally connect the two threads (Michigan in midwest? and misguided German English teachers), here one true story:
an English teacher I knew insisted, that the "ch" in Michigan is pronounced like the "ch" in Rachel, even though I told her, I was over there for a year and people in Michigan pronounce it like "sh".
Well, her reply was: "Then the people in Michigan got it wrong."

I didn't attempt to tell her about Mackinac-Island... ;o) (pronounced MackinaW)


@ Richard -- ah, sorry if I made you feel shut out by my earlier statement. There was no offense intended... ;o)

Bei mir hört sich das nach "ch-j-u-men" an.

@Richard:
Käfig, richtig etc.
Soweit ich weiß, wird -ig auf "Standarddeutsch" mit -ch (wie in "ich") am Ende ausgesprochen. Im Süden Deutschlands sicherlich nicht. In manchen Gegenden gibt es nicht einmal ein "ich-ch", da spricht man konsequent alle ch wie in "Rache" aus, in manchen Gegenden der Alb z.B.

Regarding the which/witch distinction, I seem to remember learning in a linguistics class in college (admittedly a long time ago) that a minority of American speakers make the distinction. So in this case I agree with Thomas. If someone lives in a place where the distinction is generally made, it would be easy to conclude that most people in the US also do. Also, people are perhaps influenced into thinking that they make a distinction because of the spelling, along the lines of "whine/wine are spelled differently, so I must pronounce them differently."

@Amy & Thomas -- If the majority of Americans don't make the "which/witch" distinction, then I'm with the majority, because I don't either. But my impression is to the contrary. I hear that puff of air all the time in "which" words among my neighbors in California. Also, (to cite an authority, for what it's worth), Websters 3rd International says, when talking about the symbols they use to represent pronunciation:

hw [is used to represent the sound of]... the "wh" of "whet" by speakers whose "whet" and "wet" are not pronounced the same... With most American speakers "whet" and "wet" differ in pronunciation but with most southern British speakers they do not.

Is it like 'while' from Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, which is a little different from 'wile'?
http://cougar.eb.com/sound/number/9while01.wav

But that can hardly be [W], it is clearly voiced, and sound very different than Wikipedia's sample of [W]:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons...

@ Klüber:
There are also those who pronounce it "house-t&n"...

well, maybe a bit unrelated, but it just came to my mind: when i spent a year in dublin, i was surprised to hear that the letter H was pronounced "haitch" with a VERY distinct "h" in the beginning. at school i had learnt that it was "aitch" without "h". irish english is the most beautiful anyway..

Back on topic, according to these statistics, 95% of surveyed speakers pronounce the 'h' in 'huge'.

http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguist...

@Hanna: In New York we have a Houston Street, where Houston is spoken with the "house-t&n" pronunciation, unlike the name of the city.

For what it's worth, people from the New York area do not distinguish between wh and w (while vs. while), except for people who have grown up elsewhere. I think of the "wh" (HW) sound as a Midwest or Western pronunciation, though I'm not exactly sure how widespread it is.

And all native New Yorkers would pronounce the H on human.

@martin--cal: Maybe all your CA neighbors are Midwestern transplants. I'm sure the Midwest is one of the regions where the wh/w distinction is maintained.

@Lunda: We say "aitch" here. ; - )

Oh, I didn't realize the wikipedia article on the "whine/wine-merger" also talks about the 'human/huge' phenomenon. Interestingly, Eric, it claims that the dropping of 'h' can be found in New York City.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-cluster_reductions

"Hew cluster reduction is a process that occurs in some dialects of English that causes the cluster /hj/ to be reduced to /j/.[1] It leads to pronunciations like /juːdʒ/ for huge and /juːmən/ for human; hew and yew become homophonous. It is sometimes considered a type of glide cluster reduction, but is much less widespread than wh-reduction, and is generally stigmatized where it is found. Aside from accents with h-dropping, this reduction is in the United States found mainly in accents of Philadelphia and New York City; also in Cork accents of Hiberno-English. In some dialects of English, the cluster /hj/ (phonetically [çj]) has been reduced to /ç/ so that hew and yew differ only by the initial consonant sound i.e. /çuː/ and /juː/ (Gimson 1980:212, Wells 1982:230, Ladefoged 2001:144)."

I agree that most people would not distinguish and anyway, the sound /hw/ in RP is technically a speech fault that is to be avioded and corrected!!!
Going back a bit to herb vs. erb, there is a wonderful quote from Eddie Izzard's (comedean) tour in America where he was talking about the differences between AE and BE, I have forgotten most of it, but it ends
'...you say erb and we say Herb...because there's a f**king haicht in it'!

Wow, thanks for all the feedback, haven't been here for a while and just noticed all this. Well, I now have plenty of material to convince the teachers that it's not standard American English. I myself leave of the 'h' if I'm putting on a strong London/Cockney accent but the thing is, that only sounds right if you consistently speak like that, and completely wrong if the rest of what you say is standard English, or an attempt at standard English. So, thanks everyone!

Firstly, I would like to say that I am an American, well-travelled within America. The way I have observed my fellow Americans pronouncing 'human' throughout my travels is with what is phonetically a palatalized voiceless glottal fricative, which basically means an 'h' followed by a 'y'. This accounts for the pronounciation as 'ch' in 'ich' because that is a voiceless palatal fricative, which is phonologically viable in German obviously while the palatalized voiceless glottal fricative is not, and it is close enough because its just a little bit of 'place assimilation' in linguistic jargon. In my travels throughout America I have never observed the total drop of the 'h' in any dialect unless under power of suggestion. Also, for those Germans among you wishing to sound genuinely American, using the ‘ch’ as in ‘ich’ for ‘human’ will make you sound foreign, so try to wrap your glottis around the palatalized voiceless glottal fricative.

As for the 'w' vs. 'hw', they are simply voiced and voiceless versions of the same labio-velar approximant, and create no minimal pairs in english. Having grown up in the midwest, I can attest that we only pronounce 'hw' if we are trying to impress someone because it sounds more 'formal'.

As for ‘herb’ the dropping of the ‘h’ is, in this case, quite common. Pronounciation with the ‘h’ will often result in confusion with the shortening of the name ‘Herbert’. In addition to this there are a number of other words in which the ‘h’ is dropped, these include ‘honor’ and other such words, generally loan words, e.g. in Italian, the ‘h’ is not even written in ‘onore’.

Moreover, the ‘ch’ in Michigan is a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative as in ‘schiessen’, not a voiceless palatal fricative, although these two phones often sound alike to foreign speakers of American English.

Now you have the opinion of an American linguist.

Sincerely, Jason Daniel Augustine Gilliland

Firstly, I would like to say that I am an American, well-travelled within America. The way I have observed my fellow Americans pronouncing 'human' throughout my travels is with what is phonetically a palatalized voiceless glottal fricative, which basically means an 'h' followed by a 'y'. This accounts for the pronounciation as 'ch' in 'ich' because that is a voiceless palatal fricative, which is phonologically viable in German obviously while the palatalized voiceless glottal fricative is not, and it is close enough because its just a little bit of 'place assimilation' in linguistic jargon. In my travels throughout America I have never observed the total drop of the 'h' in any dialect unless under power of suggestion. Also, for those Germans among you wishing to sound genuinely American, using the ‘ch’ as in ‘ich’ for ‘human’ will make you sound foreign, so try to wrap your glottis around the palatalized voiceless glottal fricative.

As for the 'w' vs. 'hw', they are simply voiced and voiceless versions of the same labio-velar approximant, and create no minimal pairs in english. Having grown up in the midwest, I can attest that we only pronounce 'hw' if we are trying to impress someone because it sounds more 'formal'.

As for ‘herb’ the dropping of the ‘h’ is, in this case, quite common. Pronounciation with the ‘h’ will often result in confusion with the shortening of the name ‘Herbert’. In addition to this there are a number of other words in which the ‘h’ is dropped, these include ‘honor’ and other such words, generally loan words, e.g. in Italian, the ‘h’ is not even written in ‘onore’.

Moreover, the ‘ch’ in Michigan is a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative as in ‘schiessen’, not a voiceless palatal fricative, although these two phones often sound alike to foreign speakers of American English.

Also, the ‘h’ in ‘Houston’ is almost always pronounced, even by native Houstonians. It definitely does not contain a ‘ü’ as in ‘über’ because English has no front round vowels. The ‘h’ is also palatalized (adding a ‘j’ as in ‘jäger’ to the end of it) in Houston. I may be going out on a limb here, but I think all words in English with an ‘h’ followed by a ‘u’ sound may palatalize the ‘h’.

Now you have the opinion of an American linguist (albeit a longwinded one).

Sincerely, Jason Daniel Augustine Gilliland

>>As for the 'w' vs. 'hw', they ... create no minimal pairs in english.

wail/whale
wee/whee
weal/wheel
wen/when
wear/where
wet/whet
way/whey
witch/which
wig/Whig
wile/while
wine/whine
were/whir
wither/whither
woe/whoa
Y/why


>>Pronounciation

Would that be making words into pronouns?


>>linguist

Ah. Thanks for sharing.

@Jason Daniel Augustine Gilliland, I'm a little surprised to see that a linguist describes the "hu-' of "human" as "a palatalized voiceless glottal fricative". I wonder specifically about the "glottal" element. The "-ch" of German "ach" is a glottal fricative, but not the "h" of "human". The "friction" of the "h" of "human" is at the palate, not the glottis.

Can you explain why you chose that phonemic description?