Which of the following would you normally use?
an historian
30(33.0%)
a historian
61(67.0%)
Which of the following would you normally use?
an historical figure
34(37.4%)
a historical figure
57(62.6%)
Languages are challenging, not least because they keep changing. "an historian" and "an historical figure" were some of the British grammatical quirks I got down early.
Only now, the internet tells me, times, they are a changin'. It's okay to use "a" instead of "an" for histor* words in British Englishes. I would like some more evidence on the subject one way or the other.
Comments
I'd also say "a hotel", though "an hotel" doesn't feel as wrong as "an historian".
I also agree about "hotel".
Which really is what happens when you establish rules for things that are riddled with exceptions and the non-systematic application of principles, like language. You should have seen the ways we had to wrestle with sound-shift rule writing in morpho-phonology, and we were even allowed to use optimality theory, which allowed for rule-breaking on priority ordering.
(And I almost wrote "voiced h" for "pronounced h," but then I had flashbacks to a paper I wrote on the phonology of Hupa, and the debated on whether a certain sound was an unvoiced vowel or a voiced velar fricative. I was wandering the halls of my dorm muttering like a madwoman about that one. And "voiced h" isn't really accurate anyway, so I stood down.)
I'm Gillian too, though only my mother uses my full name.