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"usage: Is it ’a historical document’ or ’an historical document’?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.
--
Ned
_______________________________________________
sqlite-users mailing list
sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org
http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
