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Hello, can you please explain to me why in the noun
LE HEROS article hasn't been contracted, as in L'HOMME ?
why is it DU HEROS and DE L'HOMME?

I know that it would be hard to pronounce "du homme", but does that mean that in the noun HEROS the letter H is slightly notable in pronunciation?

merci ...

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It's not really to do with difficulty of pronunciation.

French has something called an "h asapiré" (often called "aspirate h" in English), which is a kind of "phantom" silent consonant that apperas at the start of certain words, or in certain circumstances (notably before foreign words or quotations). This phantom consonant has the effect of blocking liaison and contraction.

The word héros is one of those words that generally begins with an "h aspiré". So at least in careful speech, speakers would tend to say le héros and if they say les héros, would not make the liaison (whereas, for example, in les_hommes, they would).

Note that:
- there is some variation among speakers as to which words "h aspiré" words and under what circumstances. For example, for some speakers Hollandais is an "h aspiré" word and "The Dutchman" would be le Hollandais, whereas other speakers would say l'Hollandais; other words notable for variation include haricot ("bean").
- a word doesn't actually have to begin with a letter "h" in the spelling to be an "h aspiré" word (notable example: onze)
- the presence of "h aspiré" can be triggered for grammatical reasons and is not necessarily tied to a particular word (notably, "h aspiré" tends to occur before quotations or foreign words)
- there have been apparent changes in trends as to the presence of "h aspiré". For example, texts from around 100 years ago tend to use the form d'York ("from York"), whereas nowadays pretty much all speakers appear to prefer de York
- a lot of textbooks say that "h aspiré" words behave as though they "begin with a consonant"; this isn't literally true: "h aspiré" words have some special properties that words beginning with a "normal" consonant don't have.
Neil thank you so much for your time. Still I don't see where is the difference between these two words, the y both have "H aspire". why is it contracted in l'homme and not in le heros?
Ah, that's the point: they don't both have h aspiré.

So homme effectively begins with a vowel. It's spelt with an h, but that's just a spelling complication: in terms of the actual pronunciation, it begins with a vowel.

On the other hand, héros begins with this "phantom" consonant-- the h aspiré. How do you know this? Well, from the spelling you can't really tell-- they both begin with a letter h. You just "have to know".

A common way of pointing out h aspiré words in dictionaries is to put a little apostrophe or asterisk before either the word or the phonetic transcription (this isn't actually standard phonetic transcription, but it seems to have become common among some dictionaries).
merci !!! you've been very helpful!
Some words were supposed to have a "h aspiré" while other words were supposed to have a "h muet", mostly due to etymological reasons . But speakers didn't necessarily follow the rules, because they tend to do what would be easier to pronounce without any possible ambiguity.

There was a proposal about totally deprecating the "h aspiré" in order to make things easier. However, this proposal was never actually accepted by the Academie Française. But a lot of people think it has been (the rumor was widely spread, always with the same poignant example: "les (h)aricots"). It's why more and more people don't care any more about the "h aspiré".

A dictionary will provide this information. However, if you pick two different dictionaries, you are likely to get different results (apparently the Larousse and Robert disagree regarding "les hyenes" for instance).

My modest advice for you would be to listen to French as much as possible in order to latch onto the pronunciation of the "h" character. Listen to French songs, listen to online radios, watch French movies, talk to native speakers and this is something you will learn easily and automatically. At least for very common words. Learning long and boring lists of words will only let you go so far and the content of those lists might slightly differ from what native speakers actually say.
Thank you, Frank!
cheers!

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