Why “le hall” not written “l’hall” as I’d expect with words starting with ‘h’, eg “l’hôtel” or “l’heure”?

Veja uma tradução

We have two types of "h" in French.

- "Aspirated h", like in hall, haricot etc.
- "Non aspirated h", like in heure, horloge etc.

Both are silent, but aspirated h's force us to make a stop between the word and its article.
That's why you can't write or say "l'haricot" or "l'hall".

Orally, you'll say "les *stop* halls" and not "lezalls".

There is no rule to know if an h is aspirated or not. Most of the time, the "silent h" comes from Latin and is often found in languages of Latin origin. The "aspirated h" comes from words borrowed from other languages like English (le hall), Frankish (le haricot), Arab (le hasard) and Dutch (le hareng)...but there are exceptions.