Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeB1972
In my head I'm now trying to say "I've got a herb garden" in a Somerset accent and I'm pretty sure the H is silent there as well so I'd reckon it's regional as to if the H is pronounced or not (Can't get it to work in brummie either)  |
Certainly there are many regional accents in which people drop their h's, but this isn't a case of dropping h's in general: it's this one specific word. There are of course many English words in which the "h" is silent (eg "honest"), but it's interesting that this specific one should have a silent "h" in American English but not British English. As you suggest, it perhaps did start out as a dialectal variation which, for some reason or another, spread to become the standard pronunciation.