Why is it that some words that start with an h use an elision (I think that's the term) and others don't? Is there a patterns to know when you use the apostrophe and when you don't (other than just learning each word individually)? From what I can tell, you don't exactly pronounce the h either way. Examples: l'hôtel et l'hôpital vs le hall et la Hollande
#When Do You Use L’ vs Le/La Before H Words?
worn folio
grizzled lake
In short, it comes down to the origins of these words. When French evolved from Latin, it retained a number of words of Latin origin that originally had an H sound like the verb habitāre (habiter, to live) and the noun hospitālis (hôpital, hospital). These H sounds had already disappeared when Old French was coming into the scene but the spelling retained them for a number of reasons like historical, etymological, or both. However, French also gained a number of new words from the Germanic languages that also had an H sound like the verb *hattjan (haïr, to hate) and the noun *hati (haine, hatred). These new Germanic H sounds were retained and only disappeared in Middle French.
Why is that important? Well, early on, French final consonants were dropping; you have froid pronounced as froi, for example. However, when the following word begins with a vowel, that vowel prevented this dropping of final consonants. Thus, we have liaison and elision. A Latinate H had already disappeared, thus liaison becomes present there like in « les hôpitaux » pronounced as « le_z_opitaux » and elision like « je + habite » becoming « j'habite ». For Germanic H sounds, they were still pronounced at that time point, so we don't have elision for « je hais » nor liaison for « les halles ».
Because of that, the only way to know if the H is muet or aspiré is by memorisation of each word
worn folio
Unfortunate, though it's really interesting to learn exactly why it is this way.
grizzled lake
If you speak a Germanic and/or Romance language, you may recognise cognate words (words that share the same origin like English hate with French haïr or Spanish hospital with French hôpital) but you still need to memorise
worn folio
Merci pour l'information ^v^
grizzled lake
If you use a bilingual dictionary like WordReference, it should tell you if an H is aspiré or not
worn folio
That's good to know. I've been meaning to find a good bilingual dictionary.