linguofreak wrote:The practice of using "an" with words beginning with H's that the speaker doesn't drop, e.g, /{n hIstorIk ivEnt/, rather than /@ hIstorIk ivEnt/ or /{n IstorIk ivEnt/.
Now that depends on the "H" word;
an historic sounds fine to me, but
an history doesn't.
I think it's one of those cases of English "borrowing" Latin or Greek words and it's not quite certain yet if it's going to pronounce the initial "H" or not. Most Romance languages drop the initial "H" (either just in speech or even in speech
and in writing) and the initial "rough breathing" of Ancient Greek is neither written nor pronounced in modern Greek, though it's written in Latin borrowings from Greek: (lat)
hora from (gr)
ὥρα, (lat)
Hellas from (gr)
Ἑλλάς, etc...
English
history from Latin
historia, ultimately from Ancient Greek
ἱστορία is one of those words too.