Ĥ


Ĥ or ĥ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless velar fricative or voiceless uvular fricative. Its name in Esperanto is ĥo.
It is also used in the revised Demers/Blanchet/St Onge orthography for Chinook Jargon.
In the case of the minuscule, some fonts place the circumflex centred above the entire base letter h, others over the riser of the letter, and others over the shoulder.

Reported demise

Ĥ was always the least used Esperanto letter, and most of its uses are in Greek etyms, where it represented chi. Since the latter is pronounced in most languages, neologistic equivalents soon appeared in which "ĥ" was replaced by "k", such as teĥniko→ tekniko and ĥemio→ kemio. Some other ĥ-replacements followed unusual patterns, such as ĥino→ ĉino.
These additions and replacements came very early and were in general use by World War I. Since then the imminent demise of ĥ has been often discussed, but has never really happened. There are very few modern ĥ-replacements, notably koruso for ĥoro. Some ĥ-words are preferred to existing replacements, such as ĥaoso vs. kaoso.
Several words commonly use ĥ, particularly those of non-Greek etymology, ĥoto, Liĥtenŝtejno or those in which there is another word that uses "k" in that context. The latter include:
An Italian italo disco singer from the 1980s had the ĥ in his stage name "Cĥato".
In quantum mechanics, Ĥ is sometimes used to represent the Hamiltonian operator, especially in the Wheeler–DeWitt equation.
It is also used in the revised Demers/Blanchet/St Onge orthography for Chinook Jargon.

Computing code