(Back in San Francisco! Safe and sound! More on that eventually.)
Last night I noticed for the first time that my parents both say “an historical” rather than “a historical”, a usage that I associate primarily with British English and that I was fairly certain I’d only ever seen in print. Not entirely certain how I’ve gone 21 years without noticing this before, but there it was. So I became curious: Just what is the distribution of this?
The usual rule is, of course, that “a” is used before consonant sounds, and “an” before vowel sounds (one of the ways that we know that the articles in English are actually proclitics, actually), suggesting that folks such as my parents drop the initial [h] in “historical”.
There’s a reasonable summary of the issue here, including some nice, well, historical background on the English language. The split, then, is over whether to drop initial [h] in unstressed syllables (explaining why my parents both say “a history” but “an historical”). It still doesn’t give any demographics for the split, however.
We get 10,400k Google hits for {“an historical” -grammar}, but 17,000k for {“a historical” -grammar”}, confirming that “a historical” is much more common on the Internet, perhaps pointing at a generational split. (Similarly, we get 465k for {“a hysterical” -grammar} and only 170k for {“an hysterical” -grammar”}. This is a much higher ratio, which possibly suggests that a certain number of the “an historical” people are just following a rule that they memorized, which doesn’t extend to other areas of their language.)
This seems somewhat contradicted, however, by the progression indicated in the reference above – [h]-dropping is a newer linguistic innovation, so “an historical” ought to be the newer form. This indicates that the “an historical” usage is BBC standard English, so this is definitely (though not only) a Britishism. There’s a well-known dictum in historical linguistics, supported by a lot of empirical data, that whenever you have a language diaspora, the people who move the farthest are the most linguistically conservative; American English, by this account, is likely to be more conservative than British English. This would seem to go nicely with the fact that “a historical” is actually the older usage, and that a few dialects (meaning, several British dialects at least, and apparently a few American ones) have begun to drop that initial [h].
So, in summary: American Standard English uses “a historical”; some American dialects have begun to drop the initial [h], either independently or somehow under the influence of British English. I’m still unclear on which dialects have done this, and the extent to which they’ve changed. (As noted above, the ratios of the Google hits seem to indicate that this happens much more for some words than for others; there can’t be a phonological explanation for this, though, as the sound environments are totally the same. So I rather suspect that in some cases it’s just a memorized rule, possibly an affectation of a Britishism.)
My own idiolect is, apparently, slightly unstable: While I’m totally consistent with “a historical”, I’m inconsistent as to whether the article “the historical” is pronounced as [D@] or [Di], but in both cases drop the [h] – so either [DI'storIk@l] or [Di I'storIk@l].
Anybody have more information on the demographics of this split?