Posted by azhenley 14 hours ago
“a San Francisco startup” /ə ˌsæn frənˈsɪskoʊ ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/
vs
“an SF startup” /ən ˌɛsˈɛf ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/
EDIT I'm wrong here - I don't think anyone ever says "an Halloween celebration" for example. But I was sure there were other "h" counterexamples than historic.
For english people, as in actual english not from the UK, its a historic, unless its for emphasis.
There is/are some religious overtones, that are infused into this. Catholics used to (or still do) say "hay-tch" for h, where as non-Catholic would say "ay-tch". However that distinction is not so acute in england(unless you're in/near liverpool), but it might be in scotland and its certainly there in NI
People who say "an historic" are wrong - they're imagining there's some exception that there isn't.
You can easily tell they're wrong because who says "an history lesson"?
People speaking dialects that don't pronounce the "h" in "history". Which used to be a lot more common when this rule was written down. I've heard several English dialects that pronounce "historian" like "istorian", and who would say "a istorian"?
English is full of obscure rules that were written down ages ago, often because one particular guy wrote down his personal preference and others accepted it as fact ("less" vs "fewer", for instance).
English speakers still can't agree whether the h in "herb" is pronounced or not. I don't see why anyone would be surprised that other words beginning with h are also subject to debate.
> if you're pronouncing the "h" (which everyone does).
You can say "an 'istoric", but that's not what we're talking about. The overcorrection is "an historic".
That also isn't specific to "historic", for example you can say "an 'ouse" but literally nobody says "an house".
Saying "a historic event" requires you to pause and stress the start of historic (a + glottal stop + "his" + ...). It's a natural phrasing pattern to have the initial part of historic unstressed, and then the h is effectively dropped even if you're not speaking an h-dropping dialect; this way "an historic event" follows as correct.
We simplify a lot of sounds in unstressed parts of words, but because we know and "see" the spelling, our brains can keep the illusion of the whole word going for us.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
Happily sourced in Wikipedia so I don't have to figure out which episode I learned that from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder <- see below the table in Taxonomy.
Kex = biscuit, from "cakes"
Keps = hat, from "caps"
"I ate a single peas" "I ate many peas"
People thought it was a mistake and generated "pea" for a new singular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
Lots of novels start off with "the gardener put down the gun" or "the elephant was never recovered" or "the money was meant to be in the shoebox" or something as a way of arousing the reader's curiosity, or making the reader feel like an active participant in some larger story that's already underway, even though this is technically bad pragmatics in the sense that it isn't cooperating with the reader's assumed desire to understand the context of the utterance.
In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
For instance: "I have gone", "I had gone" are said the same way, but there is a slight difference when you say "I have been going" and there is really no way to say "I had been going" unless contextual tokens are added onto.
Years later a friend who was learning english asked me the difference between "a" and "an" and I realised I had no idea. I know when to use each, but not the rule governing why.
Fascinating how different the experience learning a language can be when do you explicitly, through learning the structure and rules, versus via immersion where you know what's right, but perhaps not why.
Be glad you didn’t have to learn German, our grammatical gender only has more exceptions than rules.
(Edit: I just realised this might be a dialect thing. I say “ess cue ell” and not “sequel”, and “hoe tell” rather than “otel”. Australian accent)
an oh.tel or o.tel (is it still spoken somewhere like this?)
The confusion arrives for words like "herb" depending upon whether the place uses F or C for temperature ;-)
Examples from published articles: "Barely half and hour was on the clock" "the hospital, which is in and area of central Homs" "spiraled into and armed uprising and civil war" "During and interview with ABC in July"
Other examples in English are:
- who vs whom
- then vs than
- ask vs acks