Quick trivia: "h" is silent or nearly silent in a surprising number of words across English, French, and Italian. Despite that, it's one of the most visually stable letters in the entire alphabet — its basic shape has barely changed since Roman times.
Its history took a strange detour along the way. "h" started as a Phoenician letter representing a guttural, breathy consonant, possibly linked to the idea of a fence or enclosure. When the Greeks adopted it, the sound didn't exist in most of their dialects, so one branch of Greek repurposed it entirely into a vowel. Latin inherited a different branch that kept it as a consonant, which is why "h" works the way it does in English today.
Structurally, "h" is one of the easier letters to design well, since it shares its shoulder curve with "n" and "m" — solve that curve once, and all three letters mostly fall into place together.
This glyph series breaks down every letter like this. ✍️ #TypeDesign #Typography #FontDesign
Read more: https://letterhanna.com/the-letter-h-was-almost-silent-forever-how-type-design-kept-it-alive/