The Ĥ Question: Esperanto's Least-Loved Letter

Esperanto has twenty-eight letters. Twenty-seven of them are getting on with their lives. The twenty-eighth has spent most of the language's existence being politely shown the door, and is still here.

Ĥ is the rarest sound in the language. It carries a corner of the vocabulary rather than a slice of it, most of the words it does carry have a legal alternative spelling without it, the Akademio has officially blessed several of those alternatives, and yet every year somebody announces that the letter is finished and every year ĉeĥo refuses to become anything else. This article is the honest account of that stalemate: what the letter is, which words carry it, which of those words got out and how, and which ones are trapped and always will be.

What ĥ actually is

Ĥ is a voiceless fricative made at the back of the mouth. The tongue rises towards the soft palate as if you were about to say k, and then instead of releasing the closure cleanly you leave a gap and let the air scrape through.

The Fundamento's own English column gives the gloss, and it has not needed improving in a hundred and twenty years:

Ĥĥ - strongly aspirated h, ch in loch (scotch).

That is the sound in Scottish loch, German Bach, Dutch acht, Spanish jamón, Russian хорошо and Hebrew Chanukah. Which is worth pausing on, because the usual complaint is that ĥ is an exotic sound Esperanto should not have imposed on anybody. It is in an awful lot of languages. What it is not in is English, French or Italian, which is a different objection and a smaller one.

PMEG describes the anatomy against plain h, and the contrast is the useful bit:

Ĥ estas farata ĉe la velo, per la lango, dum H estas farata en la gloto, per la voĉkordoj.

Ĥ is made at the velum, with the tongue; H is made in the glottis, with the vocal cords.

So h is a breath and ĥ is a scrape, and the difference lives in a different part of your throat entirely. There is no other Esperanto sound near it, which means there is nothing to mishear it as. Say it badly and you will still be understood.

And PMEG names the real reason English speakers find it hard, which is not the one they think:

La vera kaŭzo, ke Ĥ estas malfacila por iuj, estas ĝia maloftegeco en Esperanto. Se oni havas malfacilojn pri Ĥ, oni preskaŭ neniam havas okazon ekzerci sin pri ĝi.

The real reason Ĥ is difficult for some people is how extremely rare it is in Esperanto. If you have trouble with Ĥ, you almost never get an occasion to practise it.

That is a very good joke at the expense of everybody who wants the letter removed for being too hard. It is hard because it is rare. Removing it further would make it harder.

The working inventory

Here is the set you will actually meet, with the alternative spelling where one exists. Every entry is a Reta Vortaro headword.

Two things fall out of that table before we go any further. The first is how short it is: this is not a letter carrying a quarter of the vocabulary, it is a letter carrying a corner of it. The second is that the right-hand column is not empty and not full, and everything interesting about ĥ lives in the difference.

The century of retreat, on the record

The drift away from ĥ is old, it is documented, and it has a mechanism. PMEG sets it out in one paragraph:

De la unuaj jaroj ekzistas tendenco krei alternativojn al vortoj kun Ĥ. K estas la plej proksima sono, ĉar ĝi estas elparolata en la sama loko kiel Ĥ. Tial oni plej ofte anstataŭigas Ĥ per K en la alternativaj vortoj: ĥemio = kemio, ĥirurgo = kirurgo, ĥaoso = kaoso, meĥaniko = mekaniko, teĥniko = tekniko, k.t.p.

From the earliest years there has been a tendency to create alternatives to words with Ĥ. K is the nearest sound, because it is pronounced in the same place as Ĥ. So Ĥ is most often replaced by K in the alternative words.

Note the mechanism, because it explains the whole pattern. K wins not because it looks like ĥ but because it is made in the same place in the mouth. The tongue is already there. You simply stop scraping and start stopping.

PMEG adds a sub-rule that is worth having, because it covers a family rather than a list:

Por ĉiu radiko, en kiu Ĥ sekvas tuj post R, ekzistas alternativa formo kun K: arĥeologio = arkeologio, arĥitekto = arkitekto, monarĥo = monarko.

For every root in which Ĥ comes immediately after R, an alternative form with K exists.

So rĥ is a guaranteed doublet. You never have to look one of those up.

What the Akademio actually did

This is the part usually reported wrongly, in both directions. The Akademio has not abolished ĥ and never tried; it also did rather more than merely tolerate the k-forms.

The Eighth Official Addition to the Universala Vortaro, approved in 1974, added 200 roots to the official vocabulary. Among them, printed with a gloss the Akademio does not often use:

alkemi/o. Moderna formo de: alĥemio.

arkaism/o. Moderna formo de: arĥaismo.

arkitektur/o. Moderna formo de: arĥitekturo.

kemi/o. Moderna formo de: ĥemio.

mekanik/o. Moderna formo de: meĥaniko.

monark/o. Moderna formo de: monarĥo.

meĥanism/o, mekanism/o.

kirurg/o, (ĥirurg/o).

kirurgi/o, (ĥirurgi/o).

Moderna formo de is the Akademio conceding, in its own official list, that the ĥ-spelling is the old one. That is as close to a verdict as this institution gets, and it is worth knowing about, because it means the k-forms are not a modern sloppiness you are getting away with. Six of them are officially official.

Note also the three shapes in that extract. Kemio gets the full moderna formo treatment. Mekanismo is simply listed alongside meĥanismo as an equal. Kirurgo is given with ĥirurgo in brackets. The Akademio is describing a language in the middle of a change, not tidying it up afterwards.

And PMEG's one-line summary of where that leaves you is the sentence to memorise:

Ĝenerale ambaŭ vortoj de tiaj vortparoj estas plene uzeblaj.

Generally both words of such pairs are fully usable.

Nobody is going to mark you wrong for teĥniko. They will notice, mildly, that you write like a book from 1930.

Where the k cannot go

Now the interesting half, and the reason the letter survives. A sound change that works by substitution runs into trouble the moment the substitute is occupied, and Esperanto's vocabulary is dense enough that it happens repeatedly. PMEG lists the cases:

En kelkaj okazoj simpla anstataŭigo per K kreus kolizion kun alia vorto. Tiam oni povas anstataŭigi per alia litero, ekz. Ĉ, aŭ ŝanĝi la vorton en alia maniero: Ĥino = ĉino (kino havas alian signifon), ĥilo = ĉilo (kilo havas alian signifon), ĥolero = kolerao (kolero havas alian signifon), ĥoro = koruso (koro havas alian signifon).

In some cases a simple substitution with K would create a collision with another word. Then one can substitute a different letter, e.g. Ĉ, or change the word another way.

Read that list slowly, because each entry solves the same problem differently:

• ĥoro -> koruso. Koro is a heart, and a language cannot afford to have the church choir and the human heart spelled identically. So the alternative is not a substitution at all: it goes back to Latin chorus and takes a whole extra syllable. ReVo lists koruso, korusano and korusestro as full headwords, each cross-referring to the ĥor- family.
• ĥolero -> kolerao. Kolero is anger. The escape here is to lengthen rather than swap, so cholera acquires an -ao that no other Esperanto noun has any reason to carry.
• ĥino -> ĉino. This one is not a retreat at all, and it is the odd entry in the set. ReVo's note on the archaic ĥino says the change is salutinda korekto de etimologia eraro, a welcome correction of an etymological error: the ĥ- form came from northern Europeans reading Portuguese ch by Latin rules, and ĉ- is simply closer to the source. The letter lost that one on the merits rather than on difficulty.
• ĥilo -> ĉilo. Kilo was taken by the metric prefix. Same solution as ĉino, and a good illustration that ĉ is the second-choice substitute when k is blocked.

Then there is the group that never even got as far as a proposal.

Ĉeĥo is the flagship. A Czech is a ĉeĥo, the adjective is ĉeĥa, and the country is Ĉeĥujo or Ĉeĥio. Substitute the k and you get ĉeko, which is a cheque - ReVo defines it as mandato, kiu rajtigas iun ricevi monon el la banka konto de la subskribinto. Substitute a ĉ and you get ĉeĉo, which is a Chechen. There is no third option, nobody has invented one, and so the entire Czech nation is permanently in the business of keeping this letter alive. The countries and peoples article has the rest of the ethnonym machinery; this is its most stubborn cell.

Eĥo never had a rival. ReVo lists eĥo, eĥi, eĥe and seneĥe, with no variant spelling of any kind offered anywhere on the page. Nobody appears to have proposed eko, presumably because ek- is one of the most productive prefixes in the language and the collision would have been intolerable. There is a nice footnote here: the Danish Esperanto association's magazine was called Eĥo, and it is where the pronoun ri first appeared in print in 1976, so the least-loved letter is on the birth certificate of the language's most-argued-about reform.

Ĥano has nowhere to go either. Kano is a reed.

Monaĥo is the one that won on merit. A variant monako does exist, and ReVo records it with a remark that is close to an obituary: la variaĵo monako estas apenaŭ uzata kaj aldone konfuzebla kun la ŝtateto Monako, the variant is scarcely used and additionally confusable with the little state of Monaco. So monaĥo and monaĥejo are not technically irreplaceable. They simply beat their replacement in the market, which is the only court this language has.

Ĥaoso sits at the opposite end. ReVo gives ĥaoso and kaoso, ĥaosa and kaosa, ĥaose and kaose, in complete parallel, with no preference expressed. Write ĥaoso or kaoso as you please, and be aware that you are choosing a register rather than a spelling.

Saying it, if you have never said it

For an English speaker with no Scottish or German in the family, three routes, in order of how well they work.

From k. Say ko. Notice where the back of your tongue touches. Now say it again and, at the moment of contact, do not let go - lower the tongue about a millimetre and keep pushing air. That hiss is ĥ. This is the route PMEG's own explanation implies, and it is the one that produces the right sound fastest, because it starts you in the right place.

From a whispered h. Say ha as loudly as you can whisper it, then push the friction backwards and upwards until you feel it on the roof of your mouth rather than in your throat. Slower than the k route, but harder to get wrong.

From a word you already say. If you can say loch the way a Scot says it, you can already say ĥ. If you can say Bach without turning it into Bock or Batch, likewise. Say loĥ, then ĥoro, then ĥaoso.

Two things not to do. Do not substitute plain h: ĥoro and horo are different words, and horo is an hour, which is a word you will use fifty times as often. And do not substitute k in speech while writing ĥ, because you will end up saying koro for ĥoro and telling people about the heart in the church.

Writing it without the hat

Two conventions, unequal in standing, and the orthography article argues them properly.

The h-system is the Fundamento's own. Rule 16 provides that where the circumflex cannot be printed, the letter takes a following h: ĉ becomes ch, ĝ becomes gh, ĵ becomes jh, ŝ becomes sh, ŭ drops its breve, and ĥ becomes hh. The Akademio's Oficiala Informo 6 of 21 January 2007 confirmed that this system comes first and other substitutes are for where it is impractical.

The x-system writes ĥ as hx, and it is what the internet runs on. It is unambiguous, because x is not a letter of the Esperanto alphabet and so can never be part of a word; it sorts and searches cleanly; and it converts back mechanically, which hh does not, because hh is a legitimate sequence in a compound. This site's word URLs are built on it, which is why the monk lives at /esperanto/words/monahxo and chaos at /esperanto/words/hxaoso.

For ĥ specifically the x-system is the more useful of the two, and the reason is a real ambiguity in the other one. Hh can arise honestly across a compound seam, and any converter reading hh back to ĥ will occasionally be wrong. Hx cannot arise honestly at all.

What a learner should actually do

• Learn to say it. Ninety seconds, once, and then it is done. It appears in perhaps a dozen words you will meet in your first year.
• Write the k-form where one exists. Kemio, kirurgo, mekaniko, tekniko, arkitekturo, arkivo, monarko, kaoso. These are the modern spellings, six of them are officially so, and nobody will read them as a concession.
• Keep ĥ where the language has kept it. Ĥoro, ĉeĥo, eĥo, ĥano, monaĥo, monaĥejo, ĥolero. Writing koro for a choir is not a modernisation, it is a different word.
• Recognise both members of every pair. You will read teĥniko in older books and tekniko in newer ones and they are the same word. This is the single most useful habit, and it costs nothing.
• Do not sand the letter out of your speech. The pronunciation is not optional in the words that kept it, and a ĥ said as h collides with real vocabulary.

What to take away

• Ĥ is the voiceless velar fricative: ch in Scottish loch, German Bach, Spanish jamón. The Fundamento's own gloss is strongly aspirated h, ch in loch (scotch).
• It is the rarest sound in Esperanto, and PMEG's diagnosis is that rarity is why it feels hard, not a consequence of it.
• Since the earliest years, speakers have replaced ĥ with k, because k is made in the same place in the mouth.
• Every root with rĥ has a guaranteed rk alternative: arĥeologio/arkeologio, arĥitekto/arkitekto, monarĥo/monarko.
• The Akademio's Eighth Official Addition of 1974 officialised alkemio, arkaismo, arkitekturo, kemio, mekaniko and monarko, each printed as Moderna formo de its ĥ-spelling, with kirurgo and kirurgio given with the ĥ-forms bracketed.
• PMEG on the resulting pairs: ĝenerale ambaŭ vortoj de tiaj vortparoj estas plene uzeblaj.
• Where k is occupied, the alternative goes elsewhere: ĥoro to koruso (koro is a heart), ĥolero to kolerao (kolero is anger), ĥino to ĉino, ĥilo to ĉilo.
• Where nothing was ever proposed, ĥ simply stands: ĉeĥo (ĉeko is a cheque), eĥo, ĥano (kano is a reed).
• Monaĥo beat its own alternative: monako exists, is scarcely used, and collides with Monaco.
• The Fundamento prints arĥitektur' in the Universala Vortaro and ĥ in the alphabet, so the letter is inside the untouchable text and cannot be legislated away.
• Typing it: hh in the Fundamento's h-system, hx in the x-system everybody actually uses.

See also

• Orthography and punctuation - the h-system against the x-system in full, and the Akademio's 2007 ruling on both.
• The Esperanto alphabet - all twenty-eight letters, with ĥ in its proper place.
• Esperanto pronunciation - the sound system this letter is the awkward corner of.
• Who decides what is correct Esperanto? - the Fundamento, the Akademio and the Oficialaj Aldonoj, including the 1974 one this article leans on.
• Countries and peoples - where ĉeĥo and Ĉeĥujo live, and the rest of the ethnonym system.
• False friends - the other place where a word that looks like a near miss turns out to be a different word entirely.
• Word building - the affix machinery that gives monaĥo its monaĥejo and eĥo its seneĥe.