Subj : Food for Thought
To   : Anton Shepelev
From : Ardith Hinton
Date : Wed Feb 06 2019 15:42:02

Hi, Anton!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

 AH>  I also hope somebody will have noticed that I used "a"...
 AH>  not "an"... with "one-eyed".

 AS>  What is unusual about it?  "one" starts with a sound that
 AS>  has a good contrast with, a seques comfortably from, a
 AS>  vowel.  Similarly, we do not say "What an wonderful world".


          Exactly.  What matters is the initial sound of the word... not the
spelling... and "one" sounds like "won".  Words beginning with "h" generally
follow the same principle, but there are a few added complications.

          While you understand how the system works, others may not.  I hear
many younger folk nowadays saying things like "a elephant"....  :-Q



 AS>  It is an hunderd times more lip- and ear-straining.


          I assumed you were joking because this remark immediately followed
upon another example of how "an" may sound cumbersome if used where it isn't
really needed.  Either way, however, I think some clarification is in order.
AFAIK it's not used with "human" or hundred", except maybe in dialects which
tend to suppress the initial /h/.  It appears with "hundred" in two examples
from the 17th century I found just now & until about twenty years ago it was
used with "historic"... most notably by historians, in formal communication.
With "herb" the situation is less clear because there doesn't seem to be any
general agreement as to whether or not one should enunciate the /h/....  :-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)

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