For example in le homard (the lobster) the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic ⟨h⟩ was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea). In Italian, ⟨h⟩ has no phonological value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs ch /k/ and gh /ɡ/, as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are homophones, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere (to have) (such as hanno, they have, vs. anno, year), and in short interjections (oh, ehi). Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian use ⟨h⟩ as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment. In Hungarian, the letter has no fewer than five pronunciations, with three additional uses as a productive and non-productive element of digraphs.
Other representations
See also
American Sign Language grammar
List of Egyptian hieroglyphs#H

References
External links

 The dictionary definition of H at Wiktionary
 The dictionary definition of h at Wiktionary
Lubliner, Coby. 2008. "The Story of H." (essay on origins and uses of the letter "h")