In English the history of h is very similar to that in Latin. While the parts above the glottis are in position to produce a vowel, an aspirate is produced without vibration of the vocal chords, sometimes, like the pronunciation of Arrius, with considerable effort as a reaction against the tendency to “drop the h’s.” Though h survives in Scotland, Ireland and America as well as in the speech of cultivated persons, the sound in most of the vulgar dialects is entirely lost. Where it is not ordinarily lost, it disappears in unaccented syllables, as “Give it ’im” and the like. Where it is lost, conscious attempts to restore it on the part of uneducated speakers lead to absurd misplacements of h and to its restoration in Romance words when it never was pronounced, as humble (now recognized as standard English), humour and even honour.
(P. Gi.)
HAAG, CARL (1820- ), a naturalized British painter, court painter to the duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was born in Bavaria, and was trained in the academies at Nuremburg and Munich. He practised first as an illustrator and as a painter, in oil, of portraits and architectural subjects; but after he settled in England, in 1847, he devoted himself to water colours, and was elected associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1850 and member in 1853. He travelled much, especially in the East, and made a considerable reputation by his firmly drawn and carefully elaborated paintings of Eastern subjects. Towards the end of his professional career Carl Haag quitted England and returned to Germany.
See A History of the “Old Water-Colour” Society, now the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, by John Lewis Roget (2 vols., London, 1891).