On 7/11/19 3:45 PM, Ned Fleming wrote: > On 2019-07-11 2:31 PM, Carl Edquist wrote: >>> Ginger tells me that "a historical" is technically correct, >> >> AFAICT, "an historical" is correct iff the "h" in "historical" is >> silent. >> >> Eg, "It's an 'istorical oversight to pronounce the 'h' in 'historical'." >> > > From the New Oxford American Dictionary entry for "an" -- > > "usage: Is it ’a historical document’ or ’an historical document’? ‘A > hotel’ or ‘an hotel’? There is still some divergence of opinion over > which form of the indefinite article should be used before words that > begin with h- and have an unstressed first syllable. In the 18th and > 19th centuries, people often did not pronounce the initial h for these > words, and so an was commonly used. Today the h is pronounced, and so > it is logical to use a rather than an. However, the indefinite article > an is still encountered before the h in both British and American > English, particularly with historical: in the Oxford English Corpus > around a quarter of examples of historical are preceded with an rather > than a." > > An is fading in this usage but certainly still acceptable. > Yes, the a / an distinction is largely based on the following sound, 'an' if it is a vowel, 'a' if it is not (the n sound breaks up the double vowel). words that begin with an initial unstressed h-vowel might not have the h really vocalized, so the following sound is vowelish, so it takes 'an' (there isn't enough h to break up the vowel cluster). This can largely be affected by the accent one talks with (which can be related but different than the dialect).
-- Richard Damon _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
