La elisión del fonema /h/ solo se produce en determinados tipos de palabras, pero, dado que son palabras muy comunes, resulta una elisión muy frecuente. Vamos a distinguir tres casos en los que la /h/ se omite por una elisión. Los dos primeros son, con mucha diferencia, los más importantes.
1) Las palabras funcionales (también llamadas gramaticales) he, him, his, her.
I wanted to forget her.
I met him at the theatre.
Does he know he’s going to be fired?
Andrew couldn’t make up his mind.
My father had always been something of a maverick.
What have you been doing?
He’s too weak to have lifted it.
3) El pronombre who.
Did you know the man who called you?
La /h/ se omite en estas palabras con mucha frecuencia a menos que se encuentre en una sílaba acentuada unless o al comienzo de la oración o cláusula. Por ejemplo,
He wasn’t aware of it.
I didn’t ask you. I was asking him.
Has she called your mother? No, she hasn’t.
Who did you ask for help?
Y ahora, algunos ejemplos de hablantes nativos:
Primero, las palabras he, him, his, her:
So, there’s a slightly competitive edge to what he’s writing (Esther Eidinow, BBC4).
And so when Facebook approached her for a job… (Dan Milmo, Today in Focus, The Guardian).
The decision was the result of a campaign by a Californian woman called Dorothy Mulkey. I’m Adam Smith and I’ve been to California to meet her (Adam Smith, BBC World Service).
When I met him I asked how he felt knowing the co-writer and director Paul King created the character of Phoenix Buchanan with him in mind (Samira Ahmed, BBC4).
I was like a father to him or a big brother to him and looked after him. Every morning, I’d call him out and see what he – condition he was in, whether he had a miserable night or not (Elia Kazan, speaking about his relationship with James Dean, NPR).
Luego, el verbo auxiliar have:
I found out that my car was rattling at speed because the tyres needed balancing. My car had always done that and I thought it was because it was old (Cambridge Proficiency test).
His reputation at the time, by the time of his death, was really very high but this didn’t translate into the sort of income that he might like to have earned (John Guy, BBC4).
It was the stronger messages that he would have liked to have got across (Lisa Jardine, BBC4).
Por último, el pronombre who:
ln the theatre, the pleasures are immediate. You know exactly how you’re doing it, when you’re doing it. And it’s you who decides, really, how that is each time the curtain goes up (Cambridge Proficiency test).
As I see it, whether it’s at the level of, you know, impeachment or not, the Democrats are like the boy who cried wolf on this (Megyn Kelly, PBS).