H with stroke
Letter of the Latin alphabet used in Maltese language
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Ħ (minuscule: ħ) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from H with the addition of a bar. It can be referred to as "H with stroke", "H with bar", or just "H-bar".
Maltese
Ħ is a letter used in the Maltese language, where it has two roles. An ħ by itself represents a voiceless pharyngeal fricative consonant. This sound is similar to an English h sound, but is made higher in the throat.[1]: 13 Lowercase [ħ] is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the same sound.[2] It is a common sound in the Semitic languages, of which Maltese is a member. It corresponds to the letter heth of other Semitic abjads (Arabic: ح, Hebrew: ח).[citation needed]
The other Maltese use for ħ is in the digraph għ, whose pronunciation is complex. Historically, the digraph stood for a voiced velar or pharygneal fricative ([ɣ] or [ʕ] in IPA) in medieval Maltese. The sounds have been lost from all but the most conservative Maltese dialects, so the digraph is generally silent in modern Maltese. However, vowel changes caused by these fricatives in older forms of Maltese persist; as such, the għ digraph often marks a vowel change.[1]: 14 [3]: 7, 40–44
A white uppercase Ħ on a red square was the logo of Heritage Malta until a 2022 rebrand.[4][5]
Other uses
ħobżna ta' kuljum agħtihulna llum.
An early use of this letter is found in the 1556 work of Pérez de Ayala, slightly modified from Pedro de Alcalá's Vocabulary.[6]
Ħ was also added to the alphabet of the constructed language Volapük, to represent the dental fricative sounds [θ] and [ð] (English "th").[7]: 13
Similar characters in other writing systems
The lowercase ħ looks like the lowercase Serbian Cyrillic letter Tshe (ћ).[8] It also looks like the mathematical symbol for the reduced Planck constant, , also known as "h-bar".[9]: 336 This symbol, in turn, is used as the symbol for Hedera Hashgraph's cryptocurrency, HBAR.[10]
It superficially resembles the astronomical symbol for Saturn (♄),[11] later used in the alchemical symbol representing lead.[12] However, the astronomical/alchemical symbol has a curve on the rightmost stroke that the ħ lacks.
Computer encoding
| Ħ | ħ | |
|---|---|---|
| Name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH STROKE | LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH STROKE |
| Unicode | U+0126 | U+0127 |
| Latin-3 | A1 | B1 |
| HTML Character Reference | Ħ | ħ |
The letters Ħ and ħ should be displayable on most of today's computers. They were a part of WGL-4 already in 2001.[13]