While Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, almost all Romance languages lost the sound- Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again various Spanish dialects have developed as an allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of /ʀ/.

Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets, the letter Heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/. In this context, the letter eta is also known as Heta to underline this fact. The Greek Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets, before coming to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/, still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative ( ħ). 4.3 Derived signs, symbols, and abbreviations.4.2 Ancestors, siblings, and descendants in other alphabets.

4.1 Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet.

Symbolism of letter h