www.alphadictionary.com

The past tense of klim is klum. If you have klum out on a tree limb, don't saw it off between you and the trunk.

bababoy56 wrote: <<Took me a second to realize he meant "climb" trees. He pronounced it KLIM.>>

Pity the non-native speaker trying to learn English, and looking at its spelling for clues to pronunciation. Silent consonants and inconsistent vowel pronunciation abound. Sight reading English is risk taking--like learning to climb out on a limb.

especially considering the nine (at least) pronunciations
of the letter combinations "-ough".

The dough was tough I thought.

through
cough
doughty
hough
sough
and one I forgot right at the present

It seems that this aitch thread has created a life of its own. Who'd of thunk it?

Think, thank, thunk?

By the by, doesn't the t in aitch come from French? That's why we have Tchaikovsky instead of the more correct Chaikovsky. In fact, I gather that more and more often the latter is how the name is being printed these days.

Just to toss this out there: chaika means seagull in Russian.

All standard dictionaries give the spelling as aitch. Wikipedia and a few specialized dictionaries offer the alternative spelling, haitch, probably because they can't imagine the name of a letter not containing the letter itself. Except in dialects, the H must be pronounced in an accented syllable.

Very interesting. So how do you pronounce 'H'? If some dictionaries spell it with an h at the start, and if accented syllables that start with an h should always have it pronounced, what does that mean for we mortals?

Taking your instruction literally, I suppose if we choose to spell it with an h at the start (and heaven forbid!) we must pronounce it. If not, then not. But this raises the question: Which came first the spoken word or its spelling? I guess most would agree that the spoken word came first. And on that basis we have to ask how it was pronounced when the alphabet was invented.

Oh dear! I am no nearer conclusion on this despite the learned contributions here.

Talk about a can of worms! How H was pronounced when first invented? You don't want to go there. Ancient Hebrew played with glottal stops, making soft or voiceless K sounds.

And by the way, if you don't pronounce the H in H, does it become an A?

Thanks for that Perry. The answer to your question about H becoming an A might be "Only if a W becomes a D"

@Bamaboy: I've never heard climb pronounced "klim" by anyone. Where's your friend from?

Don't know if I've heard it, or just seen it written, but I do know of "clum" as a past tense. As in, "I dun clum dat dere tree."
I suppose the b could still be used, too: clumb.