Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/375

 

H

 

H has varied in form from the Phoenician and old Hebrew symbol Q, called Cheth, ouly by the removal of the upper and lower horizontal lines. (For the oldest forms of the letter see Alphabet.) The closed form is sometimes found in old Greek inscriptions, and, though j less frequently, in South Italy.

Its value in Phoenicia was probably a continuous guttural sound the sound which it had in Hebrew resembling the German ch, and with no English counterpart. In Greece it represented nothing more than the spirant h, so long as a separate symbol to denote that sound was felt to be necessary. Afterwards it was generally employed to denote a second e-sound, under the name of Eta ; probably it had before been called Heta. The time of this change varied in different parts of Greece. In the alphabet of the island of Thera we find H representing e as early as the 40th Olympiad, though it still sometimes retained its old value. At Athens the date was 403 b.c., and here the practice did not vary. But in most of the alphabets of Greece proper, of Peloponnesus, and of the Italian colonies, II still remained as the rough breathing ; and as such it consequently passed into the Latin alphabet. It is possible that h in a very few Latin words, when it occurs as a medial sound (e.g., traho, veho), was a continuous guttural. But generally it occurs at the beginning of a word, and can hardly have been more than a breathing. Even as this it early became evanescent. During the classical period of Latin literature it was retained in the speech of educated men, doubtless in part by Greek influence. But in the popular speech it was rapidly disappearing as an initial sound ; although it continued to be written, and indeed was often written wrongly, at the beginning of words where it had no place ; e.g., umor was written humor, and the h has held its own in English spelling down to our day. The sound is almost completely lost in modern Italian.

It is not settled beyond dispute by what mechanism the A-sound is produced. The old view (held by Lepsius and others) is that h has a distinct position of its own, further back in the throat than the gutturals, in fact, immediately above the larynx, that it is a surd, to which the corre sponding sonant is the slight gurgle heard between words of which the first ends and the second begins with the same sound (e.g., " go over "), if we take care to close the glottis between the two words but not to alter the position of the other vocal organs. A quite different view is held by Whitney, M. Bell, and others, that h has no distinct position of its own, but is sounded in or through the position of the following sound ; for example, that in say ing ha we do not put the vocal organs into two positions, one for h and one for a, but we put them into the position for a, and then produce the breath and the vowel without any change of position, the h being a mere expiration of breath through the open glottis ; similarly hi, hu, &c., are produced with the vocal organs in the position for i, u, &c., respectively ; in each case the vocal chords vibrate for the vowel after the expiration of breath, but there is no change made within the orifice of the mouth between the 7i-sound and the vowel. This view is at least a plausible one.

HAARLEM, a city of the Netherlands, the chief town of the province of North Holland. By rail it is 1 1 miles W. of Amsterdam, 19 S. of Alkmaar, and 20 N. of Leyden. Distant about 5 miles from the German Ocean, it commu nicates with the Zuyder-Zee by the Spaarne and the Ij. The railway to Amsterdam was opened in 1839, and that to Alkmaa-r in 1867.

1. Gas Works. 2. Infirmary. 3. Town-House. Plan of Haarlem. The Cathedral of St Bavo or Groote Kerk. 5. R.C. Ch. of St Joseph. 6. Barracks. 7. Teller s Foundation.

Haarlem is a typical Dutch town. The branches of the

Spaarne and an extensive system of canals bring the ship- traffic into the heart of it, and turn its streets into so many quays. The roadways are paved with bricks; the houses have gable-ends with old-fashioned crow-steps; and every thing wears a decent and quiet aspect, which to one man is dulness and to another " aristocratic gravity and modest coquetry." What the city lacks in liveliness it makes up by the interest of its historical associations and the numberof its scientific and artistic institutions. The great market place especially has much that is worth seeing : the town-house and the cathedral of St Bavo ; the old meat market, a build ing of the end of the 16th century in the old Dutch style ; the stadsdoelen, or place where in former times the burgesses used to assemble in arms ; and the statue erected to Koster in 1856, when in Holland he was still generally considered the inventor of printing. St Bavo s is one of the most famous churches in the Netherlands. It is a cruciform structure completed in 1538, and makes a considerable impression on the spectator by the great length (about 426 feet) of its main axis and the li eight and steepness of the roof. The tower is about 255 feet high. Within the lofty vaulting is supported by twenty very light columns, and there is a good deal of beauty about the perspective of its aisles. The organ, built by Christian Muller of Amsterdam between 1735 and 1738, was for some time the largest in the world, and is still celebrated for the sweetness of its tone, especially in the vox humana stop. It possesses four key -boards, 64 stops, and 5000 pipes, the largest of which is 15 inches in diameter. Among the monuments in the church are those of Bilderdijk the poet and the hydraulic engineers Christiaan Brunings and Fredrik William Conrad, the latter the projector of the sluices at Katwijk. In the belfry are the damiaatjes, small bells presented to the town according to tradition by A^ ^ illiam I., the conqueror of Damietta. At the head of the scientific institutions of Haarlem may be placed the Dutch society of sciences (Hollandsche Maatscliappij van Wetenschappen) founded in 1752, which possesses very valuable collections in botany, natural history, and geology. Teyler s found ation (Teyler s Stichting), instituted in acu>rdance with the last will of Pietre Teyler van der Hulst for the study of

theology, natural philosophy, poetry, history, drawing, and