[OT] @grammar

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, March 30, 2020 11:07:06 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 06:43:35PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Monday, March 30, 2020 6:31:35 PM MDT Ali Çehreli via Digitalmars-d
>
> > wrote:
> [...]
>
> > > While we're off-topic, let's talk about what scratches my ears most:
> > > “an his­toric event”. Nooo! :) My Turkishness requires sounding that
> > > 'h' well, so it should be "a historic event". :)
> >
> > Well, that stems from how it _used_ to not have the h sound (coming
> > from the French word, histoire, which has no h sound), but yeah, given
> > that history is definitely pronounced with an h in modern English, it
> > should definitely be "a" history/historic/etc. and not "an"
> > history/historic/etc. now. Some schools may still teach "an history"
> > though. It can take a while for some of that stuff to shift.
>
> [...]
>
> I've never heard of anyone recommending "an history", but then again,
> hyper-correcting oneself is a known phenomenon in linguistics, where
> sometimes people retroactively reconstruct a supposedly more accurate /
> historical / etc form that actually never existed historically.

It was taught that way when I was in elementary school in the 80's (at least
where I went to school). If you do a search on it, it's clearly the case
that at minimum, historical gets pronounced without an h in some accents and
that it used to be more common to pronunce it that way. It's less clear if
much of anyone would pronounce history without an h at this point or how
recently it would have been common, though given its French origin, it's
pretty much a given that it was pronounced that way at some point.

Regardless, I think that the rules are pretty clear in that if the h is
pronounced at the beginning of a word, then its article should be a, and if
the h is not pronounced, then it should be an. The issues with a vs an with
words like history or historical therefore come primarily from changes in
pronounciation over time and/or differences in pronunciation in different
parts of the world. The English can't speak proper English like we Americans
can after all. ;)

- Jonathan M Davis