4 ms·
> The one I actually find annoying though is when people use "an" before a word that starts with a (pronounced) h, like "an historic building". It's like, dude,
by gnicholas 4y ago
> The one I actually find annoying though is when people use "an" before a word that starts with a (pronounced) h, like "an historic building". It's like, dude, I know you're trying to seem all smart and superior and it isn't working. (Of course, if they said it with a french accent and a silent h that would make more sense.)
This is something that has puzzled me as well. My wife, a historian (not "an historian!") will write this way, and when I've asked her about it she says it's just the proper way. When I looked into the history of it, I concluded that it probably made sense for the British (who say "historian" with a somewhat silent "H"), and probably for early Americans. But for those of us who speak Standard American English, it seems somewhere between unnecessary and stuffy.
I wonder how spell checking software deal with this? IIRC it's an exception for words starting with "H" where there emphasis is not on the first syllable (which would result in the "H" being enunciated).
- scubbo 4y agoI don't know for sure, but I suspect (in keeping with the fetishization of Latin that motivates many prescriptivist rules, like the injunction to never split an infinitive) that this arises from Ancient Greek[0], wherein there is not a separate letter "H" but rather a modification ("breath", if I remember rightly?) on the vowel. If you (mis)apply this rule to English, "hospital" starts with a vowel. [0] this might be true in Modern Greek as well, I don't know - but English professors don't have such a raging boner for the modern version.
- bee_rider 4y agoHow do you pronounce the sentence “This is a historic building” out loud? I don’t pronounce the h. I propose we start writing it as “an ‘istoric” to correct the mismatch.
- wahern 4y agoI say hiss-storic but have always used "an" as the sound still fits the aural pattern rule in my head. It never even occurred to me that people would ever think it was wrong or pretentious to use "an". Though, I was always conscious that "a historic" wasn't wrong, either; yet it still looks and sounds off to me, like someone is deliberately exaggerating a hard h sound.
- gnicholas 4y agoI say "historic" with more of an "H" than "hour" (which I pronounce the same as "our").
- Tagbert 4y agoIf I may ask, which dialect of English do you speak that the "h" is silent in "historic"?
- bee_rider 4y agoI’m from New England, but not like Boston or Rural Maine, so I don’t have one of those super strong paak tha caa accents. It isn’t always silent, just when preceded by… a vowel I think? I dunno, I’m in public so I don’t want to look like a weirdo trying out test sentences.