Re: YAEPT: "year" (sorry!) (was Re: Why "y" ain't arbitrary (was: I...

Gary Shannon wrote:
> --- Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:
> That was an historic event.
>
> Aha! 'H' is a vowel!  I always wondered about that.
> ;-)
Well, as Philip said, 'H' is a letter, though I still know
what you mean - I've never known it to mean a vocoid in
itself.

But you example strikes me as mind-bogglingly strange. Sure,
if one is speaking a variety where "history" is pronounced
"'istory", then there's nothing remarkable about "an historical"
(/an Istorikl=/, broadly). But are you suggesting that some
people say /an hIstorikl=/?

While writing this email I've had a bit of a bad conscience since
at the back of my mind there's been a little memory of someone
actually saying such a thing trying to surface. So I left the
email as a draft for a few minutes, and now I've remembered:
it was in a Monty Python sketch, from someone speaking absurdly
oldfashioned hyper-RP. So maybe it happened once :). Or do you
actually say it?

s.
--
To be sure                              Stephen Mulraney
   to be sure                            ataltane@ataltane.net

Reply