Fwd: usage ridicule

[Joel S. Berson]

I asked another list (one dealing with the 18th century) about
Austen's "an house", "an husband", and so far have not gotten any
explanation -- just discussion of the "an before a/e/i/o/u/h" case --
e.g., "an historical" (for some).

But someone there asked Google for an Ngram for "a" vs. "an
historical".  It's interesting what happened about 1940.  Quoting him
without his permission:

>Here's a graph plotting the relative popularity of "a historical"
>and "an historical" from 1800 to 2000:
>
>http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historical%2Can+historical&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
>
>The explosion of "a historical" around the middle of the last
>century probably has to do with America's increasing dominance of
>the publishing world.  Still, limiting it to British English shows
>"a historical" is still the more common form.

Joel

At 3/27/2012 10:30 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>Begin forwarded message:
>
> > From: Eric Nielsen <ericbarnak at GMAIL.COM>
> > Date: March 27, 2012 7:17:53 AM EDT
> > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> > Subject: Re: usage ridicule
> > Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >
> > I (dimly) remember being taught a rule that h-words with an accented first
> > syllable were to use an "a"; those with an unaccented first syllable used
> > an "an". Monosyllabic h-words also used an "a". Do monosyllabic words have
> > accent? I always wondered about the British "an house".
>
>Does this really still occur?  I know it was still appearing in Jane
>Austen, where there are many sequences of "an house", "an husband",
>etc., which I assumed wouldn't have been pronounced as written,
>although that's just a guess. ...

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