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H-droppingH-dropping is a colloquial term used to describe the "dropping" of initial "h" in words like "house", "heat", and "hangover" in many dialects of English, particularly in England. It is often regarded as a solecism. The same phenomenon occurs in many other languages, such as Serbian, and Late Latin, the ancestor of the modern Romance languages. Interestingly, both French and Spanish acquired new initial h in medieval times, but these were later lost in both languages in a "second round" of h-dropping. The opposite of h-dropping, so-called h-adding, is a hypercorrection found in typically h-dropping accents of English. A classist stereotype, commonly found in literature from late Victorian times to the early 20th century, holds that some lower-class people consistently drop h in words that should have it, while adding h to words that should not have it. An example from the musical My Fair Lady is, "In 'Ertford, 'Ereford, and 'Ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly hever 'appen". In practice, however, it would appear that h-adding is more of a stylistic prosodic effect, being found on some words receiving particular emphasis, regardless of whether those words are h-initial or vowel-initial in the standard language. Words borrowed from French frequently begin with the letter "h" but not with the sound . Examples include hour and honest. In some cases, spelling pronunciation has introduced the sound into such words, as in hotel and (for most speakers nowadays) historic. The spelling-pronunciation has also been added to the British pronunciation of herb, , while American English retains the older pronunciation .
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