H with stroke

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. Lowercase is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the same sound. 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 (, ).

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 ( or 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.

A white uppercase Ħ on a red square was the logo of Heritage Malta until a 2022 rebrand.

Other uses

An early use of this letter is found in the 1556 work of Pérez de Ayala, slightly modified from Pedro de Alcalá's Vocabulary.

Ħ was also added to the alphabet of the constructed language Volapük, to represent the dental fricative sounds and (English "th").

Similar characters in other writing systems

The lowercase ħ looks like the lowercase Serbian Cyrillic letter Tshe (ћ). It also looks like the mathematical symbol for the reduced Planck constant, \hbar, also known as "h-bar". This symbol, in turn, is used as the symbol for Hedera Hashgraph's cryptocurrency, HBAR.

It superficially resembles the astronomical symbol for Saturn (♄), later used in the alchemical symbol representing lead. However, the astronomical/alchemical symbol has a curve on the rightmost stroke that the ħ lacks.

Computer encoding

The letters Ħ and ħ should be displayable on most of today's computers. They were a part of WGL-4 already in 2001.

References

References

1. (1980). "Maltese: A complete course for beginners". Hodder & Stoughton.
2. (2026). "The International Phonetic Alphabet".
3. (2018). "The Languages of Malta". Language Science Press.
4. (11 December 2021). "Heritage Malta 2020 Annual Report".
5. "'Part of Us' - Heritage Malta launches its new brand identity".
6. (1556). "Christian doctrine in the Arabic-Spanish language".
7. (1890). "Comprehensive Volapük grammar". Mattapan, Mass..
8. (2013). "The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets". Routledge.
9. (20 November 2017). "Matter and Interactions". John Wiley & Sons.
10. "Brand Guidelines".
11. (30 January 2018). "Solar System Symbols".
12. (2016). "Alchemical Symbols".
13. "WGL4 character set U+00BC to U+017E".