I can hear people say "human" without the h-sound, while in other words like "huge", the h isn't dropped.
Learn English – Is “human” sometimes pronounced as “yuman” and why
pronunciation
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First, it's "shwa". It's a Hebrew word, not a German one, so there's no reason for SCH.
Second, it's both a phone [ə] in IPA, and a phoneme /ə/ in English. As a phone, it's got the sound of the final vowel in German Danke, of the first vowel in French Le Mans, or the first vowel in English the man. There is no shwa in Spanish or Italian.
Third, as a phoneme in English, /ə/ doesn't contrast with any other central vowel, so it has a lot of allophones: /ə/ [ɨ] [ə] [ʌ] (in increasing order of stress and decreasing order of speed), plus syllabic resonants [ṃ] [ṇ] [ḷ] [ṛ], before those consonants.
The best way I can suggest to practice the sound [ə] is to open your mouth to say an [e] (whatever that you think that is in your language), and then — while saying it, and without changing how your mouth or lips are positioned — move your tongue backwards toward the center of your mouth.
What you wind up saying is likely to be something close to a shwa.
Besides indict and its compounds, the only other word I know of with 〈ict〉 pronounced /aɪt/ is deictic, which is pronounced /ˈdaɪktɪk/. (It has various compounds, too: anapodeictic, endeictic, epideictic.) But that’s because of the 〈ei〉 not the 〈ict〉.
What’s going on with indict is different. It used to be endite or indite. ɴᴏᴛᴇ ᴡᴇʟʟ: We got it from the French without any c in it in the first place. So we never said what wasn’t there. (And in fact indite still exists but now with a somewhat different meaning.)
Regarding indict, though, the OED2 writes that there seems to have been some confusion along the way:
indict /ɪnˈdaɪt/, v.1
Forms
- ɑ. 4–6 endyte, 4–7 endite, 6 endight (endict).
- β. 4–9 indite, 5 indyte, (6 indyght, 6–7 indight).
- ɣ. 7– indict.
Etymology
ME. endite-n, a. AFr. endite-r to indict, charge, accuse, corresponds in form to OFr. enditer, -ditier, -ditter, answering to a late L. type *indictāre, f. in- (in-2) + dictāre to say, declare, dictate. But the OFr. verb is recorded only in the senses ‘make known, indicate, dictate, suggest, compose, write, instruct, inform, prompt, incite’ (Godef.), so that the history of the AFr. and ME. word is not clear. A corresponding med.L. indictāre to indict, accuse, is cited by Du Cange only in English legal use, and seems to be merely the latinized form of the AFr. and ME. verb, in accordance with which again the ME. endite has been altered to indite, and (since 1600) written indict, though the spoken word remains indite. See also indite v.
The sense of endite, indict, may have arisen from L. indīcĕre ‘to declare publicly’, taken as in Ital. indicere ‘to denounce’ (Florio); but it comes near to a sense of L. indicāre to indicate ‘to give evidence against’; and it appears as if there had been, in late L. or Romanic, some confusion of the L. verbs indicāre, indīcĕre, indictāre: thus in Ital., Florio has ‘Indicare, to shew, to declare, to utter; also to endite and accuse, as Indicere’; ‘Indícere, to intimate, denounce, manifest, declare;··also to accuse, to appeach or detect’; ‘Indittare, to indite; also as Indicere’; ‘Indittore, an inditer, a denouncer; also an intimator’.
So along with various words like debt and island, indict got dubiously “Latinized” by putting in a still/now-silent letter. The pronunciation never changed.
Best Answer
Your premise is incorrect. Most people pronounce the /h/ in both human and huge. And out of those people who drop the /h/ in human, most of them also drop the /h/ in huge, humor, humid, and so forth.
See this article. It's a trait found in several local dialects, including those of New York City, Philadelphia, Cork, and Dublin. For these speakers, words starting hu /hju.../ are pronounced with yu /ju.../.