Garnet

The garnet is the official mineral and color of Bates College. The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively. Garnets are very abundant in the lower crust and mantle and thus play an important role in geochemical understanding of the Earth. The EBCDIC code for capital H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136. Pyrope varieties are used as kimberlite indicator minerals in diamond prospecting. The ASCII code for capital H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; or in binary 01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly. Garnet sand is a good abrasive. In Unicode the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lowercase h is U+0068.

Pure crystals of garnet are used as gemstones. Due to opposition by monarchists, the word Thron "throne" was exempted from this and left with <th>. When doped with neodymium (Nd³⁺), these YAl-Garnets are useful as the lasing medium in lasers. A century ago, there was a spelling reform which eliminated the silent <h> in all instances of <th> in native German words such as Thee or Neanderthal. Yttrium aluminium garnet (YAG), Y₃Al₂(AlO₄)₃, is used for synthetic gemstone. This is the origin of the spelling (or pronunciation) of the English ejaculation "Eh?" which is not at all like an English pronunciation of the letter "e". One example for this is gadolinium gallium garnet, Gd₃Ga₂(GaO₄)₃, which is synthesized for use in magnetic bubble memory. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word "erhöhen", only the first <h> is pronounced as /h/.

By substituting specific sites with rare earth elements, for example, interesting magnetic properties can be obtained. In the German language, this letter is used in the digraph "ch" and the trigraph "sch" to indicate completely different sounds. The iron ions in the two coordination sites exhibit different spins, resulting in magnetic behaviour. In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. In yttrium iron garnet (YIG), Y₃Fe₂(FeO₄)₃, the five iron(III) ions occupy two octahedral and three tetrahedral sites, with the yttrium(III) ions coordinated by eight oxygen ions in an irregular cube. Dictionaries mark those words that have this second kind of h with a preceding mark, either an asterisk, a dagger, or a little circle lower than a degree-symbol. It is used as an indicator mineral in the search for diamonds. a harp.

Knorringite is basically pyrope with a very high chromium content and is often found in kimberlites. Some of these distinctions have been preserved in English through Anglo-French: an honour vs. Garnet with high knorringite content may be generated only under high pressure. In some cases, an h muet was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea). Pure knorringite never occurs in nature. As is generally the case with French, there are numerous exceptions. Knorringite is a magnesium chromium garnet with the formula Mg₃Cr₂(SiO₄)₃. Most words that begin with an h muet (or "a" h muet, interestingly) come from Latin (honneur) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe) or non-Indo-European (harem, hamac) languages.

It is found in crystalline marbles and schists in the Ural mountains of Russia and Outukompu, Finland. There is no elision with such a word; the preceding word is kept separate by similar means. This is a rather rare garnet, bright green in color, usually found as small crystals associated with chromite in peridotite, serpentinite, and kimberlites. Hence masculine nouns get the le, separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Uvarovite is a calcium chromium garnet with the formula Ca₃Cr₂(SiO₄)₃. The other way is called h aspiré, or "aspirated h" (though it is still not aspirated) and is treated as a phantom consonant. This garnet was discovered in the 1960s in the Tsavo area of Kenya, from which the gem takes its name. For example Le plus Hébergement (accommodation) becomes L'Hébergement.

One of the most sought after varieties of gem garnet is the fine green grossular garnet from Kenya and Tanzania called tsavorite. Similarly, words such as un, whose pronunciation would elide onto the following word would do so for a word with h muet. Grossularite is found in contact metamorphosed limestones with vesuvianite, diopside, wollastonite and wernerite. The h muet, or "mute h", is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so masculine nouns get the article le replaced by the sequence l'. Because of its inferior hardness to zircon, which the yellow crystals resemble, they have also been called hessonite from the Greek meaning inferior. The French language classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways that must be learned to use French properly, even though it is a silent letter either way. Other shades include cinnamon brown (cinnamon stone variety), red, and yellow. In the French language, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/.

The name grossularite is derived from the botanical name for the gooseberry, grossularia, in reference to the green garnet of this composition that is found in Siberia. H is silent in some words of Romance origin:. Grossularite is a calcium-aluminium garnet with the formula Ca₃Al₂(SiO₄)₃, though the calcium may in part be replaced by ferrous iron and the aluminium by ferric iron. In transliterations from Russian, zh may occur for /ʒ/. Topazolite is a golden yellow variety and melanite is a black variety. H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value /h/ or silent) and in the 2-letter graphemes ch(/tʃ/), gh (either silent or /g/, /f/) , ph (Greek words with /f/), rh (Greek words with /r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (either /θ/ or /ð/), wh (either /w/ or /ʍ/: see wine-whine merger). Demantoid has been called the "emerald of the Urals" from its occurrence there, and is one of the most prized of garnet varieties. The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ is a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.

Andradite is found both in deep-seated igneous rocks like syenite as well as serpentines, schists, and crystalline limestone. It is often assumed that the pronunciation /eɪtʃ/ is a result of h-dropping, but in fact the original name of the letter was /aha/; this became /aka/ in Latin, passed into English via Old French /atʃ/, and by Middle English was pronounced /aːtʃ/. The recognized subvarieties are topazolite (yellow or green), demantoid (green) and melantite (black). The pronunciation affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an HTML page" or "a HTML page". Andradite is a calcium-iron garnet, Ca₃Fe₂(SiO₄)₃, is of variable composition and may be red, yellow, brown, green or black. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. Violet-red spessartites are found in rhyolites in Colorado and Maine. It is common in Australian English, often identified with those educated by Irish emigrants in Roman Catholic schools.

Spessartite of a beautiful orange-yellow is found in Madagascar. However it is standard in Hiberno-English, and among Saint-Léonard Italians in Montreal. It occurs most often in granite pegmatite and allied rock types and in certain low grade metamorphic phyllites. Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ (and hence spelling haitch) is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. Its name is derived from Spessart in Bavaria. The English name of the letter is generally pronounced /eɪtʃ/ and spelled aitch. Spessartite or spessartine is manganese aluminium garnet, Mn₃Al₂(SiO₄)₃. Hence, H is used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as ch in Spanish and English /tʃ/, French /ʃ/ from /tʃ/, Italian /k/, German /x/.

The garnets from mantle derived rocks, peridotites and eclogites, commonly contain a pyrope variety. This may be because /h/ was sometimes lost between vowels in German, but it may also have to do with the fact that Romance lost /h/. Pyrope is an indicator mineral for high pressure rocks. In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as the phoneme /h/. The color of these blue garnets is not like sapphire blue in subdued daylight but more reminiscent of the grayish blues and greenish blues sometimes seen in spinel However in white LED light the color is equal to the best corn flower blue sapphire or D block tanzanite this is due to the blue garnets ability to absorb the yellow component of the emitted light. In Etruscan and Latin, the sound value /h/ was maintained, but all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from F, then lost it again, and Castilian /x/ has developed an [h] allophone in some Spanish-speaking countries. Another intriguing find is the blue color-change garnets from Madagascar, a pyrope spessatine mix. (In Modern Greek, this phoneme fell together with /i/, similar to the English development where EA /ɛ:/ and EE /e:/ came to be both pronounced /i:/.).

Pyrope has nicknames of Cape ruby, Arizona ruby, California ruby, Rocky Mountain ruby, and Bohemian garnet from the Czech Republic. The early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on, this letter, eta (Η, η), became a long vowel, /ɛ:/. A variety of pyrope from Macon County, North Carolina is a violet-red shade and has been called rhodolite, from the Greek meaning "a rose." In chemical composition it may be considered as essentially an isomorphous mixture of pyrope and almandite, in the proportion of two parts pyrope to one part almandite. The form of the letter probably stood for a "fence". Transparent pyropes are used as gemstones. The Semitic letter ח (khêt) probably represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (IPA /ħ/). The color of pyrope varies from deep red to almost black. .

It is ruby-red in color and chemically a magnesium aluminium silicate with the formula Mg₃Al₂(SiO₄)₃, though the magnesium can be replaced in part by calcium and ferrous iron. Its lowercase form, [h], represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and its small capital form, [ʜ], represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative. Pyrope, from the Latin pyropos, means similar to fire. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Almandite has nicknames of Oriental garnet, almandine ruby, and carbuncle. Its name in English is aitch. Almandite occurs in metamorphic rocks like mica schists, associated with minerals such as staurolite, kyanite, andalusite, and others. H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet.

Chemically, almandite is an iron-aluminium garnet with the formula Fe₃Al₂(SiO₄)₃; the deep red transparent stones are often called precious garnet and are used as gemstones (being the most common of the gem garnets). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix. The term "carbuncle" is derived from the Latin meaning "little spark." The name Almandite is a corruption of Alabanda, a region in Asia Minor where these stones were cut in ancient times. The h infix marking of "Ghod" and other words spread into the 1960s counterculture via underground comics, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three communities overlapped heavily at the time). Almandite, sometimes called almandine, is the modern gem known as carbuncle (though originally almost any red gemstone was known by this name). It is likely to have originated in the fannish catch phrase “Bheer is the One True Ghod!” from the mid-20th Century. . In science fiction fandom and hacker jargon, the infix of an h is a method of "marking" common words, i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard, ironic, or humorous way.

Garnet is the birthstone for January, and has been used since the Bronze Age. In Canada, H stands for the Metropolitan Montréal area. uvarovite-grossularite-andradite. As the first letter of a postal code: