The Letter H
By Allan Haley
Frankly, of all the letters, the H is the most boring. Stable and symmetrical, with both feet planted firmly on the ground, the H has been predictable in its design and use throughout much of its history. For example, it held the same position (the eighth letter) in the Semitic, Greek, Etruscan, and Latin alphabets as in our own. Only in the hands of type designers like Ed Benguiat (or in ten-dollar words like “heliotrope”) does the H begin to exude a touch of glamour.
Many historians believe that the H started out as the Egyptian hieroglyph for a sieve. It represented the same guttural, back-of-the-throat sound (think hissing cat) used by the Sumerians over a thousand years later, once again demonstrating the H’s yawn-provoking consistency. The Semites called the character kheth, which meant “fence.” Indeed, their representation of it could be imagined to resemble a fence, or at least part of one.
Somewhere around 900 B.C. the Greeks borrowed the kheth and dropped the top and bottom horizontal bars. Since they couldn’t pronounce the sound of the kheth, they called the letter eta. It was first used as a consonant. Later, however, the sign acquired the sound of a long ‘e’, to distinguish it from the short ‘e’ sound represented by the Greek letter epsilon.
The Etruscans and Romans adapted the Greek eta for their own alphabets. The Etruscans put the top and bottom crossbars back on the letter, while the Romans continued to leave them off. The monumental Roman H was the prototype of our current eighth letter.
- Allan Haley is Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging. Here he is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs. He is also responsible for editorial content for the company’s type libraries and Web sites.
- Prior to working for Monotype, Mr. Haley was Principal of Resolution, a consulting firm with expertise in fonts, font technology, type and typographic communication. He was also executive vice president of International Typeface Corporation.
- Mr. Haley is ex officio Chairman of the Board of the Society of Typographic Aficionados, and past President of the New York Type Directors Club. He is highly regarded as an educator and is a frequently requested speaker at national computer and design conferences.
- Mr. Haley is also a prolific writer, with five books on type and graphic communication and hundreds of articles for graphic design publications to his credit.