Four rules: three positions, one exception
The first three are one rule: h is silent everywhere. They are split because Mandarin speakers go wrong in different ways in each position — pronouncing it word-initially, breaking the word medially, and counting an extra syllable in hue/hie.
The number after each row is how many corpus words matched. This corpus has a tiny vocabulary, so several rows show 0: not because that type is rare (ahora, huevo, hacer are among the commonest words in the language) but because these short sentences happen not to use it. The examples are therefore recorded separately (click to hear).
Word-initial h is silent; the vowel starts the word: hola = [ˈola], hora = [ˈoɾa].
H inside a word is silent too, leaving the two vowels in separate beats — a-ho-ra is three syllables with no consonant in the middle.
With the h silent, hue- reads [we]- and hie- reads [je]-: two syllables, not three.
The only case where h “takes part” — but what sounds is the c half: /tʃ/, one unit, with the h itself still silent.
Six homophone pairs: the hardest evidence
Each pair differs only by the initial h. If h took time, the h-word would have to be longer. The two columns on the right are measured: Δ = difference in voiced-segment length (ms), wave = peak correlation of the two aligned waveforms (1.00 means the same audio).
hello / wave
hour / he prays
until / horn
fact / I throw
sling·deep / wave
iron / error
Why h is there at all
It used to be a Latin f
hacer comes from facere, hijo from filius, hablar from fabulare. In Old Spanish this h was actually pronounced ([h]); it fell silent around the 16th century, but the spelling never changed. Today's h is a fossil: it marks where a sound used to be.
Silence creates homophones
hola (hello) and ola (wave); hasta (until) and asta (horn) — two spellings, one sound. The same kind of consequence as the ll / y merger: the sound changed, the spelling did not.
In linking, h simply is not there
Taking no time, it cannot block linking either: in mi hora the i and the o are adjacent and merge into one beat — mi hora sounds like mjora. There is no such thing as a pause “because there is an h”.
Three places Mandarin speakers slip
Pronouncing the h
hola becomes “ho-la”, hotel becomes “ho-tel”. English has silent letters, but the habit of reading what you see is strong. In Spanish the h occupies nothing — the following vowel starts the word.
Counting an extra syllable in hue / hie
huevo becomes “hu-e-vo”, three syllables. Once the h is silent, ue is the diphthong [we] and the word has two syllables, [ˈwe.βo]. Same for hielo: [ˈje.lo], not [hi.ˈe.lo].
Assuming the h in ch is silent too
The h in ch is indeed not pronounced, but the c changes: ch is [tʃ], not [k] plus a silent h. The c+h spelling is historical; as a sound it is one unit.
The numbers on this page
Pairs: 6, each word synthesised on its own (es-ES female voice) and measured for voiced-segment length — the first and last frame whose envelope exceeds 5% of the peak.
Criterion: |Δ| ≤ 40 ms counts as “h takes no time”. The threshold is not arbitrary: θ is the Spanish voiceless fricative, the same class as [h] (friction, no periodicity). The 12 measurements on this site run from 40.2 ms (shortest) to 65.4 ms (median): a friction segment that is actually produced cannot be shorter. Measured |Δ|: median 0.0 ms, max 15.0 ms — all inside the threshold.
Waveforms: peak Pearson correlation within ±20 ms after aligning segment onsets. This is a second, independent route — equal duration can be coincidence, equal waveforms cannot. Δ is quantised at 5 ms per frame, so 0.0 means “less than one frame”, not “exactly zero”.
Corpus: 2 words beginning with h, 0 h + ue/ie, 0 with h inside, 12 containing ch. These counts are small because the corpus consists of short sentences; they are not a distribution, which is why the examples are not drawn from it.