Invisible 'H' by Jan Edwards
A recent Facebook thread was discussing the pronunciation of A in conjunction with an invisible H at some length. I suspect we have all come across that old chestnut of how to enunciate ‘bath’ (or ‘grass’, ‘class’, ‘pass’) and whether it/they should be pronounced with or without the unseen H as in ‘b-ah-th as opposed to b-a-th. Though the originator of the Facebook post now lives in California he is a Brit by birth, and, his original question was to his US counterparts on how they heard those invisible H sounds. In his case he was specifying the distinction between ‘ass’ and ‘arse’ as a play on words. Perhaps not the best example as it turned out. Several people appeared genuinely confused to learn that in the UK the word ‘ass’ generally refers to a donkey and/or a stupid person, whilst an ‘arse’ is a part of the anatomy (and yes, occasionally also a stupid person). This would seem to be a different question on the surface but one can see...