H, the Sütterlin letter h

History

The letter H is the 8th letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a voiceless glottal fricative /h/ in syllable onsets, and serves as a silent lengthening marker (Dehnungs-h) after vowels in words like 'Sohn' or 'Jahr'.

Sütterlin lowercase h regularizes the three-zone structure: an upright ascender loop, a straight downstroke continuing into a descender loop below the baseline, and a clean arch in the middle zone. Capital H consists of two upright vertical pillars joined by a central cross-loop.

In historical German manuscripts, h is pervasive both as an initial consonant ('Haus', 'Hof', 'Herr') and as a lengthening marker. In older orthography prior to the 1901 spelling reform, h was also written after t ('Thür', 'That', 'Theil'), making it a frequent dating indicator in archival texts.

H began in Proto-Sinaitic writing as a fence,^[1] which became the Phoenician letter chet.^[2] Greek first took it over as heta, for h,^[3] and the Romans took H from the Etruscans but gave it the look of the Greek letter.^[4]