Someone claims to me that the hyphen in the word "Uh-oh" is a letter, not a punctuation mark, because it represents a phonological instruction (the glottal stop). Is this true? I have never heard of hyphen being a letter in under certain conditions, neither did I find anything suggesting it can be when googling, but i might not be googling the correct terms.
8 Answers
It depends on what you mean by ‘letter’.
But that gets tricky. Is ‘ç’ a letter in English? How about ‘ï’ or ‘ô’ or ‘ü’? They’re found in some English words (or at least, they used to be, English has lost most of the diacritical marks it inherited in loan words, as well as the few it had originally, for multiple reasons), and the presence of the diacritics does alter pronunciation from the ‘norm’ for English. And then you get actual letters like Æ or ð that were used historically but aren’t anymore. And at least early on, & was categorized as a letter (you can still find some old needlework samplers with the alphabet that include it).
And that’s just looking at English, it gets even more complicated when you consider other languages. For example, Arabic and Hebrew don’t consider tashkīl or niqqud respectively as letters, even though they definitely encode phonetic information that is crucial for correct pronunciation.
And that Arabic/Hebrew example is really instructive, because it showcases the reality that a ‘letter’ is largely what people who use the language agree it is. And for English that means that of the things I mentioned above (ç, ï, ô, ü, Æ and ð), none are considered letters in modern English (the first four are existing letters with diacritical marks, Æ is a ligature, and ð is uncategorized), and the same applies to hyphens because they are treated solely as punctuation.
As an aside, it’s debatable whether the hyphen is what’s encoding the glottal stop. The first ‘h’ could fit that purpose just as well, as could the simple separation of the syllables (note that ‘uh-oh’ is also written as ‘uh oh’ and pronounced exactly the same way).
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Speaking of Hebrew and Arabic it is worth noting that these do have letters for a glottal stop, and treat it as a consonant.– Roger V.Commented Dec 11 at 10:27
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Interestingly enough, in German, ä, ö, and ü are considered to be distinct letters, or at least that was the case when I was taught German about 40 years ago. Commented Dec 12 at 11:28
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1@BenHocking The same is generally true of other Germanic languages (though the set of letters is different, for example ä, ö, and å in Swedish or æ, ø, and å in Norweigian), and seems to be the case to some extent for many Uralic and Turkic languages as well (again with different sets of letters). English largely inherited it’s treatment of diacritical marks from French though, which generally does not see things like Ç, Î, or Æ as distinct letters. Commented Dec 12 at 12:03
Nobody has ever passed a law or established a multinational treaty decreeing what is or isn’t a letter. But there is an essentially universal convention that English has exactly 26 letters, and those particular 26 symbols do not include the hyphen.
Your informant is, of course, welcome to use whatever definition of letter they may wish. But they are not empowered to oblige anyone else to adopt their idiosyncratic usage of the word.
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2Things like the Hawaiian ʻokina and the ! in various Khoisan languages are letters in those languages. Although are they letters in English? There are also symbols such as apostrophes (forward or backward) used in romanizations of Arabic (not in Arabic script); it's less clear if they count as letters or not. Some romanizations of Chinese and Japanese use apostrophes to mark syllable breaks; I think most people would agree they're not letters.– Stuart FCommented Dec 9 at 21:07
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2@EdwinAshworth, added a link to the Wikipedia article entitled English Alphabet. Not exactly authoritative, but as I state in my answer, there is no authority to decree any definition. Commented Dec 10 at 2:45
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4Saying "Nobody has ever passed a law or established a multinational treaty decreeing what is or isn’t a letter" won't work. There are international standards about this, and the Unicode Consortium is quite solid about what is and is not a letter.– tchrist ♦Commented Dec 10 at 3:44
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18Come on, @tchrist, the Unicode Consortium maintains a standard for IT interoperability. They are no more “in charge” of what is or isn’t a letter in the English alphabet than anybody else is. Our writing system, and in particular our alphabet, is a convention and nothing more. Nobody has any authority to decree its makeup. And anyway, all Unicode does is standardize how the letters are represented digitally; it does not dictate what elements constitute the alphabet. Commented Dec 10 at 4:12
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5@tchrist the Unicode consortium's authority to maintain the Unicode standard is not established by law or by international treaty (nor is the standard itself).– phoogCommented Dec 10 at 15:21
"Someone" is incorrect.
The hyphen does not represent a glottal stop. You have two "words" (sounds). "Uh" and "oh." The hyphen is connecting the compound "word" and isn't always present when writing the phrase. E.G., the phrase can be written "uh-oh" and "uh oh."
The Oxford English Dictionary claims the phrase's first written use was 1925 in the Amarillo Globe (Texas, U.S.A.) newspaper.
For a more detailed discussion of the phrase, see this question.
If the hyphen represented a glottal stop then the correct spelling would be ‑uh‑oh, which it isn't.
The pronunciation of uh oh is the same as the pronunciation of uh-oh.
The vast majority of hyphenated compounds do not contain a glottal stop whatsoever.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the hyphen has nothing to do with pronunciation; it is not a letter; and the fact that its position corresponds with the second of the two glottal stops in uh-oh is just a coincidence.
The glottal stop can actually be a letter in many languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop_(letter)
However, in the above articles, the hyphen is never used with this meaning. It would not be completely absurd, for instance, the english word for the !kung people is written with an exclamation mark (to represent an alveolar click), which comes from the IPA letter (and which has now its own Unicode character, different for the exclamation mark).
In this case, my understanding for "uh-oh" is rather that the hyphen is just used to join both words and the fact that there is a glottal stop at this position is just a coincidence. Considering it as a letter seems a bit far-fetched.
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems defines a letter as “a graphic symbol that represents one or more phonemes of a language”.
In other words, letters correspond to sounds - an "A" makes an "ah" sound. What sound does a hyphen make by itself?
Accents or other diacritics aren't letters because despite the fact that they modify the pronunciation, they do not correspond to any phoneme themselves. Even if the argument can be made that a hyphen modifies how a word is pronounced (and I would argue that in this case it doesn't, as "uh oh" without the hyphen is pronounced exactly the same as "uh-oh" with a hyphen), that doesn't make it a letter. The vast majority of people would not associate "-" with any particular sound whatsoever in any circumstance, and the vast majority would not consider it a letter.
Some interesting discourse on what makes a letter may be found here (What is a letter?), trying to disentangle the functional role of a letter from its representation from the very notion of it. Some interesting observations that letters aren't solely defined by their phonetic nature, as letters are still letters when used in mathematical notion, for example. But it seems clear there is a strong link between letters and phonemes, which a hyphen does not have.
answered Dec 9 at 15:27
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4His argument is that the hyphen in this word represents the glottal stop (ʔ) Commented Dec 9 at 16:31
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1@user619687 Even if it does result in the pronunciation of a glottal stop, that's only by virtue of the surrounding letters. If you wrote "-" alone on a page and asked people what sound it corresponds to, I doubt most would say it's a glottal stop, or any other sound at all. The usual purpose of a letter is to represent a phoneme, but that is not a hyphen's usual purpose. That said, there isn't really a source that unequivocally defines letters which everyone must adhere to for all purposes. But the vast majority of people would not call a hyphen a letter. Commented Dec 9 at 17:11
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2'Gnome' has 5 letters as does 'psalm'; letters can be silent. 'B' as a character is pronounced /biː/, and '-' is pronounced /ˈhaɪ.fən/; /// A hyphen appearing in a word can produce a change in pronunciation (as well as meaning): ('If you re-view the movie, next time you will be able to write a decent review.') So can archetypical ('a'- 'z') letters: 'I hid' / 'I hide'; 'sat' / 'sate'. /// Some archetypical letters double as words; others don't. /// I fully agree with 'the vast majority would not consider [ "-"] a letter'. But it needs supporting references. From dictionaries, probably. Commented Dec 10 at 0:37
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1@EdwinAshworth Silent letters are called such because they are atypical - there is usually no need to specify that a letter is articulated. That letters are occasionally silent does not mean that they are not usually associated with a phoneme. I specifically mentioned that a hyphens can change pronunciation but that doesn't make them letters. Reference added. Commented Dec 10 at 14:07
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1@HagenvonEitzen That letters can make many different sounds on their own or in conjunction with other letters, or in some cases even make no sound at all, does not change the simple fact that letters are generally associated with sounds. I'm not saying all letters are always pronounced, or that all non-letters must be aurally undetectable, just that it is usually the case. Commented Dec 11 at 14:35
While a glottal stop is indeed present in the pronunciation of "Uh-oh," the hyphen itself is not a letter. It's a punctuation mark used to indicate a break or pause in a compound word or phrase. In this case, it helps to visually separate the two syllables and suggests the presence of a glottal stop between them.
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If "letter" exclusively referred to a mapping between written characters and phonetics AND if hyphens mapped to a glottal stop with some consistency, then there would be a decent argument for hyphens to be letters.
The reality is that hyphens don't consistently map to any sound, and "letter" is such an overloaded term that there's little hope of using it in any linguistic argument that holds water.
General_Category=Letter, of which more than 300 have with the propertyGeneral_Category=Modifier_Letter. Of these latter, many do resemble diacritics or punctuation marks but are considered letters all the same. However, none clearly looks like a hyphen, and we do not encode words like uh‐oh using any of them anyway. See also Bringhurst.