Dominican philologist and lexicographer María José Rincón has argued that Spanish should keep the letter H in words of Taíno origin, such as bohío and hicotea, even though the letter is widely dismissed as silent.
Writing in the Eñe section of Diario Libre, Rincón said letters do not always represent a sound, and the Spanish H is the clearest example, often labelled mute even though that is not always accurate.
Rincón said critics who question keeping the H point out that it represents no sound at all, but she said that is only true at the standard level of speech. In colloquial or popular Spanish, she said, the H is often pronounced with an aspiration, similar to a soft J sound.
She pointed to the everyday word harto, meaning fed up, as an example. She said that for most Spanish speakers that H is far from silent, and is heard clearly with an aspiration, sometimes so close to the J sound that people even spell it out as harto with a jota.
Origins in 15th-century Spanish
Rincón traced the practice back to the mid-15th century, when the use of H to represent an aspirated sound became widespread in Spanish words that had begun with an F in Latin. At that time, she said, the H was not silent at all but clearly represented that aspirated sound.
That is why, she said, Taíno words that were apparently pronounced with a similar aspirated sound were written with an H when they were adapted into Spanish spelling. She cited bohío and hicotea as examples, saying both were graphic adaptations, fixed in the 16th century, of Taíno words carrying that aspirated sound.
From common sound to 'vulgar' stigma
Rincón said that as the Spanish language evolved, that aspiration came to be seen as vulgar, a stigma she said it still carries today, and it gradually disappeared from cultured and formal speech.
The sound vanished, she said, but the letter that originally represented it did not, because spelling in Spanish follows both pronunciation and tradition.
Living fossils of a lost language
Taíno was the language spoken by the indigenous people who inhabited much of the Caribbean, including present-day Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico, before Spanish colonization. Bohío, a simple thatched hut, and hicotea, a freshwater turtle, are among the Taíno words still used in everyday Spanish.
Rincón said the H that survives in some of these Taíno-origin words speaks of history, tradition and respect, regardless of whether today's speakers pronounce it with an aspiration or not.
She said what is truly beautiful and significant is that these words already tell, through their spelling alone, the story of the disappearance of the languages that produced them, surviving as what she called moving living fossils that carry those stories forward.
She added that what matters most is passing on the meaning of that heritage to speakers, so they learn to know these words, value them, learn to write them correctly, and above all keep using them so they remain alive and current.
No academy can impose the rules
Rincón said no institution and no language academy, something she said there is clear proof of every day, is able to impose anything on speakers. At most, she said, they can set certain orthographic norms, and sometimes not even that, because language simply does not work that way.
Rincón is a philologist and lexicographer who holds the letter Z chair at the Academia Dominicana de la Lengua, the Dominican Republic's national language academy.
