Aspirations to Silence
The Totemization and Alleged Decline of French ‘aspirate’ H
John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze
Click cover to enlarge Booksellers & libraries: | Research Monographs in French Studies 75 Legenda
ISBN: 978-1-839543-76-0 (hardback) • RRP £95, $120, €120 ISBN: 978-1-839543-77-7 (paperback, forthcoming) ISBN: 978-1-839543-78-4 (JSTOR ebook) Nothing raises purist hackles so fiercely as des haricots ‘beans’ pronounced /de.za.ri.ko/ with a /z/ liaison or un haricot ‘one bean’ as /œ̃.na.ri.ko/ with a linking /n/. In Reference French, it is stigmatized as uneducated, like dropping aitches in English or pronouncing them in hour or honour. Every orthographic h- is silent in Modern French, but some act like consonants to prevent elision and liaison. So-called ‘aspirate h’ is conventionally traced to fifth-century loanwords from Frankish whose initial /h-/ persisted till the late Renaissance but was then lost leaving consequences that are now opaque, hard for French children to acquire or foreigners to learn. This study identifies far more ‘aspirate’ words than can be attributed to Frankish, and much variability in their pronunciation. It re-examines their history and brings forward systematic evidence from dialect atlases and educational practice to detect how and when /h/ became a sociolinguistic variable. John N Green is Emeritus Professor of Romance Linguistics in the University of Bradford. Marie-Anne Hintze was formerly Senior Lecturer in French Studies in the University of Leeds. Bibliography entry: Green, John N., and Marie-Anne Hintze, Aspirations to Silence: The Totemization and Alleged Decline of French ‘aspirate’ H, Research Monographs in French Studies, 75 (Legenda, 2025) First footnote reference: 35 John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze, Aspirations to Silence: The Totemization and Alleged Decline of French ‘aspirate’ H, Research Monographs in French Studies, 75 (Legenda, 2025), p. 21. Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Green and Hintze, p. 47. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) Bibliography entry: Green, John N., and Marie-Anne Hintze. 2025. Aspirations to Silence: The Totemization and Alleged Decline of French ‘aspirate’ H, Research Monographs in French Studies, 75 (Legenda) Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Green and Hintze 2025: 21). Example footnote reference: 35 Green and Hintze 2025: 21. (To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.) This title is distributed on behalf of MHRA by Ingram’s. Booksellers and libraries can order direct from Ingram by setting up an ipage Account: click here for more. Permanent link to this title: www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Aspirations-to-Silence www.mhra.org.uk/publications/rmfs-75 |
1 October 2025 • 322pp