The Letter

Standing firm on its two-foot¬
ed foundation, and nearly
always predictable in design
and use, the H is a model of
stability. For example, it has
consistently held the same
position as the eighth letter in
the Semitic, Greek, Etruscan,
and Latin alphabets. It can be
said that of all the letters, the H
is, well, the most boring. It is
only in the hands of type
designers like Ed Benguiat, or
in words like “heliotrope,” that
the H looks the least bit exotic.

Many historians believe that
our eighth letter started out as
the Egyptian hieroglyph for a
sieve. Providing an almost te¬
dious steadiness of personality,
it represented the same guttur¬
al, rough breathing sound (sort
of like clearing your throat)
used by the Sumerians over a

had no linguistic use for) the
sound signified by the kheth,
they simply abandoned that
part of it and called the letter
eta. Although the eta was first
used to denote a guttural, rough
breathing sound, it gradually
came to represent the sound of
a long e, to distinguish it from

thousand years later. The Semi- the short e sound of epsilon.

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tes called their eighth character
kheth, which means “fence,”
and represented it by a drawing
of something that could be
imagined to look like a fence,
or at least part of one.

Somewhere around 900 B.C.
the Greeks borrowed the sign.
They dropped the top and bot¬
tom horizontal bars, and since
they couldn’t pronounce (and

When the Etruscans and
Romans adopted the eta into
their alphabets, each handled it
somewhat differently. The
Etruscans put back the top and
bottom crossbars that the
Greeks had removed, while the
Romans continued to leave
them off.

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For type designers the H
poses the problem of how to
connect, rather than push
apart, two strong verticals.
Despite the fact that it tends to
look square, it is a relatively
narrow letter whose width is
typically about three-fourths of
its height.

As in the B, the E, and the
R, the H’s horizontal stroke
usually sits slightly above its
mathematical center. Some¬
times it can be placed quite
high or low, resulting in a man¬
nered, albeit less boring, look.

« H H

ITC Anna Baskerville ITC Benguiat

The severity and simplicity of
the H’s design inspires some
type designers to add orna¬
mentation to the crossbar.
Generally this strategy is inef¬
fective, and virtually impossi¬
ble to successfully implement
in a type design intended for
text composition.

The H is a very important
letter. Along with the capital О
and lowercase n and o, it is one
of the first letters of an alpha¬
bet on which traditional type
designers will begin their work.
The H, in addition to these
other characters, helps lay the
foundations for stroke weight,
proportion, and spacing rela¬
tionships that are applied to
the rest of the alphabet.

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