It's pronounced Haitch

My father doesn't pronounce his h's. He thinks the names Helen and Ellen are the same. My sister and I would try to correct him through our lives, especially when he called his own sister Ellen, when her name was Helene (I’ve left out the accents for English effect). "What's the difference" he'd say, "I said (H)elene". The reason it probably bothered us so much was that besides that one little letter, my father, who's native tongue is French, spoke perfect English. He's fluently bilingual in both French and English, yet the letter 'h' escapes his reach.

It is true that the letter 'h' is silent in French so it makes sense that it's difficult to pronounce for some Francophones. I guess I could compare it to my pronunciation of the letter 'r'. I can't roll my r's like most French speakers do so well. But then that's not the only reason people know I'm Anglophone, there are many slips of my English tongue that give it away.

I wish I could speak French better than I do. I remember as a child a mean little French girl made fun of me for saying something incorrectly. I must have been traumatised by the little witch because for most of my childhood I became shy when spoken to in french. I spoke in school when I had to, otherwise I avoided it as much as possible, which is why I never became as bilingual as the rest of my family.

Later on, when I entered the workplace, my bilingualism improved but I still wished that I had learned French first. English seemed so easy to me and French was this cryptic code of conjugated verbs, and an impossibly long list of masculine and feminine nouns. Do I know this person well enough to use 'tu', which way does the accent grave point? And should I be using the subjunctive right now?  

As it turns out, I should feel lucky to have English as my mother tongue. Because according to English the inescapable language by John Steele Gordon, while English is known to linguists as the "grammarless language",  it's hardly without it's difficulties for foreigners. English spelling and pronunciation are...not well coordinated. This made me realize that I am, as Gordon puts it, like most people; “oblivious to the oddities and weirdness of their native tongue-as well as its simplicities-for precisely the same reason that fish are oblivious to water.”

English is weird and often makes no sense at all. Why do we spell through with a silent gh? But pronounce those same letters in tough? 

Gordon’s article provides some insight in to the complexities of language. It’s an entertaining read for anyone who speaks multiple languages or is trying to learn a new one. And because English dominates the Internet and scientific language around the world, I should count my lucky stars that I can’t roll my r’s like my French friends do so effortlessly. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll ever stop trrrrrrying.