Do Americans drop the "h" in "hey"?
Like - ay how you doing? ay wait a minute!
Like - ay how you doing? ay wait a minute!
Do Americans drop the "h" in "hey"?
no we don't. we pronounce the /h/ - this is true of most words that begin w/ h except for the word "herb" which has a silent h.
We Americans even pronounce the 'h' in light, right, sight, tight, blight, fight, bight, slight, dwight, weight, yeah, rough, tough, dough, white, whiz, what, wham, why, wheel, whip, Whitachi, etc etc... Awesome dudes!
There are a few actual words (that is, not interjections like "hey") with silent "h" - for instance, "honest", "honor", "homage", "heir". All of these come from French, in which "h" is always silent. Confusingly, "historic" often takes "an" before it instead of "a" - "an historic moment", for example - but it has a pronounced /h/ at the beginning.
This is actually left over from standard early-20th-century practice (and what I think could still be British practice, though I'm probably wrong), where "an" was used if a following word started with "h" but did not have a stressed first syllable - "an hotel", for instance. Americans no longer follow this, but "an historic" is a common enough phrase that a lot of people simply learn it as an exception. I use "a historic", myself, as do most US publications.
Here's a link describing the "a" vs. "an" thing. http://www.theslot.com/a-an.html
This is actually left over from standard early-20th-century practice (and what I think could still be British practice, though I'm probably wrong), where "an" was used if a following word started with "h" but did not have a stressed first syllable - "an hotel", for instance. Americans no longer follow this, but "an historic" is a common enough phrase that a lot of people simply learn it as an exception. I use "a historic", myself, as do most US publications.
Here's a link describing the "a" vs. "an" thing. http://www.theslot.com/a-an.html
<<Like - ay how you doing? ay wait a minute! >>
I don't think so. But there is 'eh' which has the sound as if you had dropped the 'h' from 'hey'.
I don't think so. But there is 'eh' which has the sound as if you had dropped the 'h' from 'hey'.