Why Americans don't pronounce the H in herbs

herbs

we Americans say

herbs

, you Brits and various peoples of the world under more immediate or direct cultural influence of the British may wonder why the Yankees don't

pronounce

the h in herbs correctly. I guess we could ask them if they

pronounce

h. In honor of our air, then why do you pronounce the h in grass? These are all loan words from French and the French basically never pronounce h when it appears in the initial position of a word or at the end or in various other places, French is complete. of silent letters that I suspect they set as traps so that they can feel smug when we, the lesser peoples of the world, are foolish enough to simply read all the letters on the page like some kind of novice.

I'm just kidding the French. In fact, English is also full of all kinds of silent letters that trip people up all the time, but part of this is because English is also full of particularly culinary English. steak just like you anglicized herb by pronouncing herb h by some estimates almost a third of the vocabulary in english comes from french although there is apparently some academic debate over the finer details take my example above of soup according to the dictionary of Oxford English, among others. sources, soup actually comes from French, but before that it comes from Latin, as does most French as a Romance language.

On the other hand, not all Romantic influence in English should be attributed to the French right, I mean, the Romans themselves conquered what they now. call England more than a thousand years before the French-speaking Normans, that is, on the other hand, in the mutant third hand, the people who began speaking what we now call English did not live in England at the time of Roman Britain , the Angles and the Saxons. and the Jutes were still migrating through central and northern Europe at that time, they and other Germanic peoples, of course, had their own rich cultural exchanges with the Romans and, in fact, the oed recognizes that the word soup can having originated in the Germanic peoples who transmitted it to the Romans. who passed it on to the french who passed it on to the english who were a germanic people anyway it gets complicated when you get into the details unraveling who passed which word to whom almost as complicated as when you try to pass packages around the world, You should know that I had all kinds of exciting channel marketing plans for the last year and all of that had to be put on hold due to logistical challenges.

I should have considered you as the sponsor of today's video Shipstation Shipstation is the #1 shipping software for ecommerce sellers wherever you sell things online, whether it's ebay, amazon, etsy, your own Squarespace site, it doesn't matter, Shipstation will absorb all those orders so you can see them together in one place from the Shipstation interface that you can easily manage. Orders print labels automate email updates for your customers and of course you can connect with major carriers. You can easily compare rates from ups and fedex and the like. You can even get discounts on rates that carriers typically reserve for large Fortune 500 companies.

I'm a small business person myself right now and I'm interested in any solution that allows me to focus more on doing interesting things and less on the aspects convenient to deliver to people who ship more in less time to go to the shipping station. com regucia to get a 60-day free trial, which is two months free of hassle-free, stress-free shipping. My link is in the description. Have the shipment go through. Anyway, we were saying that the field of etymology is full of controversies and complications, but it's safe to say that. that many English words come from French, this is one of the reasons why English dictionaries tend to be very fat compared to Spanish dictionaries, we often have two or more words for the same thing in English because we have a French word for it in English and an English word for it in English a classic example of this is meat terminology pork is an English word pig is a French word cow is English beef is French sheep is English lamb is French Are you noticing a pattern here?

The language of the cold and dirty countryside, French is the language of the warm and welcoming table. Now look, language policing bothers me as much as anyone, but could you ask for more convincing evidence that language affects culture and vice versa? I mean this whole idea. That French is Elegant This dates back to the Norman Conquest of England, as almost literally a thousand years ago, a French-speaking elite came to rule over an English-speaking lower class. English speakers raised the pig. The French speakers ate it up, at least they ate it. option cuts and all these old class dynamics may have been completely forgotten today if they had not been incorporated into our language.

The words we choose to use to describe things have the power to perpetuate social attitudes and this is not the most harmful or harmful thing. An example of that, but anyway herbs, when one language absorbs a word from another, there is usually some degree of initial and ongoing adaptation. I may not pronounce the h in herbs, but I do pronounce the h in history. Human habit. Hollandese sauce. These are all words from France. where I don't pronounce the initial h and yet I do because language evolves, solitary words become cognates two different words in two different languages ​​that look or sound similar because they have a recent common ancestor, in fact one could argue that herb is not a loanword The word is already a cognate, the modern French spelling is herbie and it is pronounced or something like that.

Don't know. Words don't stop evolving magically once they branch out into another language. They continue to evolve here in the native or donor language. All languages ​​keep moving and diverging from each other and that is how you end up with cognates and this same divergence also happens between different dialects of the same language. British English did not stop evolving from the time the colonists broke away and began to develop their own dialects of American English according to the Oxford English Dictionary, you British people said grass with a silent h until sometime in the century XIX, only then did they start adapting this loanword to their own pronunciation habits because gradually that's what always happens, and that's why I just said habit instead of abbott, for some reason we Americans just We haven't gotten around to anglicizing weed, but I'll put it on the to-do list.

I'll send that memo to everyone else. I'll try. include it in our main programme, but until then I will continue to say weed instead of weed, although some of you Brits like to try to tell me that weed is factually incorrect. This is an argument I have had many times. people on the internet who like to say that British English is redundant, proper English is only spoken in England and poor English is spoken everywhere else including Scotland, Wales and Ireland, sure, I mean it's there in the English name England, but just because something is the name of a place doesn't mean that the people currently living in that place own that thing, I mean for example this variety of basil is named after Italy, it's Italian basil , but it's my basil, I own this basil and basil doesn't even originate in Italy it originates from tropical Africa and Asia and where English came from originally came from here Beowulf territory maybe we should defer to the Danes on what whether or not it is proper English and you know, the British if you don't want much from other people who speak your language and change it well, then maybe you shouldn't have colonized half the world and forced the people there to adopt your language.

I'm just saying herbs anyway, which are even herbs in the heavily influenced culinary English. In French, of course, herbs are soft-leaved plant parts with a super strong flavor, a flavor so strong that you generally wouldn't use them on their own, you'd use them to flavor other things, but in botanical terminology herb has a very long definition. broadest herb in botany. It is any flowering plant that does not grow some type of woody stem, and by that definition, rosemary is not actually an herb because it has a very thick woody stem like a small tree trunk, in contrast to this banana, which is a herb, botanically herbaceous plants remain. soft on the ground, which often causes them to die in winter as this banana plant has, but they will grow green and new in the spring, just as I hope this banana plant produces leaves that are herbs in the botanical sense but not in the culinary sense.

Unless, of course, you're talking about one of the many cultures where they really value the taste of banana leaves, but I think we've gone down enough tangents for one day, aren't you going to do something else? I'm going to water my herbs