On the Diachronic Change of /h/ in English

Abstract

Although Old English voiceless velar fricative /x/ had a wide range of distribution, its Present-day English reflex, i. e., /h/, occurs only initially before vowels as in house, head, hard, heat, etc. This restricti on of distributional freedom was brought about by a series of processes eliminating /x/ (or /h/) in the history of English.
In this paper it is argued that the fricative /x/ was reinterpreted as the glide /h/, and that this reinterpretation caused elimination of all the occurrences of /h/ in the contexts where a glide does not normally occur, i. e., in the first member of an onset cluster and in the coda. This reinterpretation in turn was caused by (i) the preference of a symmetrical phonemic structure and (ii) the articulatory and acoustic instability of velar obstruents.
Furtherm ore, the reanalysis, or the development of the glide /h/ may be ascribed to the establishment of the status of glides in the consonant system of English.