gripe from a lurker (a/an)

[Dennis R. Preston]

Sooner or later you-all will catch on to the easy rule (mine, which yields,
for example, "a apple," not to mention "the apple" with schwa in the
article).

dInIs



>That's odd. I find the use of (a) in the quoted American Heritage
>Dictionary passage quite jarring to both eye and ear. I'm not a linguist
>and don't know the terminology for it, but I find my pronunciation of the
>(h) in the unstressed first syllable of "historic/al" to be vocalic enough
>to require (an); whereas the stress it receives in "history" pushes the (h)
>far enough into the consonantal realm that (a) seems more natural.
>
>Scott Swanson
>==a Montanan de-lurking briefly.

Dennis R. Preston
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736