Silent “H” in Herbal

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys. This is Kyle calling from Denton, Texas at the University of North Texas.

Hello, Kyle.

Hi, Kyle. What’s up?

So recently I went to England to visit someone that I was dating at the time.

And at tea time, they asked what type of tea I would like.

And I said, I would love some herbal tea.

And they all kind of laughed and they said, don’t you mean herbal?

And I said, no, herbal.

And they’re like, well, there’s an H in front of it.

Why wouldn’t you pronounce the H?

And I was completely baffled, and I had no answer for them, and I knew someone that I could call.

So that’s why I called you guys.

So did you ask them if they were being honest?

Yes, I did.

But that would make sense, because we don’t count the H there either.

Well, here’s the story, and it’s pretty simple.

I think you can memorize this for the next time you go to England and you have tea, all right?

You should probably plan your trip now just to have this moment.

Okay, awesome. I already am.

Originally, the word was in Latin, and it meant grass or green things or herbs, herbs,

And was borrowed into Old French with the H intact.

And in French, though, they don’t pronounce the H, so the pronunciation was herb, right?

That’s the way the French do it.

They do not pronounce the H at the beginning of a word if it’s followed by a vowel.

And the British, however, used to say herb and herbal as well, right?

So it was borrowed into British as herb and herbal, and it was this way for the longest time.

But then the British in the 1800s noticed that there was an H in the word.

Right.

It took them a while.

And started to pronounce it.

And they started to pronounce it herb and herbal.

But by this time, the word had already transferred itself to the English speakers in the New World, and we hung on to it.

We kept the old H-less sound here in North America, because some Canadians pronounce it that way too, and never went to the H-ful sound.

This is called linguistic conservatism.

We have conserved something that historically was in the language, whereas other branches of the language have not conserved it.

They have not retained that feature.

And therein lies the tale.

We actually have the older pronunciation of the word and they have the newer one.

But if you tell them this, they will deny it because the British believe that they have the ur, the purest version of English, and we have the bastardized stepchild version.

Exactly.

Of course.

Because we just are waiting to negate letters from our words according to them.

But, you know, the H is a problem, child, as you pointed out with honest.

You know, and the word human, we get emails frequently about the word human

Because there are certain people who don’t pronounce the H.

For example, Terry Gross says human without the H.

So next time I come, I will tell them that we’re actually the older speakers of the language.

Yeah, yeah, and they do have a hard time believing that,

But that’s because they don’t know the history.

And it’s on a case-by-case basis.

So for some things, we have conserved the tradition.

In some cases, we have innovated.

And therein lies the disagreements that we have.

They also have conserved some traditions, and they’ve innovated some different features of English.

So we are not in agreement on everything.

Exactly.

That’s for sure.

Well, Kyle, thanks so much for calling, and happy travels.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

So have you picked up a word in your travels that you’d like to talk about?

You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org or find us on Facebook or Twitter.