The use of 'an history' is something which makes no grammatical sense and yet it is used commonly. It's not typically an expression used by psychotic Gellerites and other low lifes but rather by people with at least passable verbal skills.
So why do they do it.
Here some thoughts from the Purdue Owl Online Writing Lab: Using Articles
Who knows what Purdue does with an Owl but the bird doesn't know why 'an' is used with 'history' either. The article advises 'an' is appropriate when the 'h' is silent but that's not true for 'history' so the final answer is 'well, I just dunno.'
In use, it most often pops up with people being pretentious about their knowledge of grammar but really it doesn't show anything of the kind. It's not my purpose to find such people and try to shame them for destroying the language as all I would like to find behind this is some logic.
Tip: it ain't there
The above isn't all that strange as English abounds with anomalies of that nature. The one I hear most often is the past tense of 'catch' and just try to explain the logic of 'caught' vs 'catched' to someone who speaks English as a second language.
Cat: I don't say anything as being pedantic about using 'caught' is indefensible. All I can figure with stuff like that is it goes back to some kind of fish Chaucer catched and he thought it was important to say he caught it (i.e. it makes no sense).
Maybe I shall start using 'catched' as well as it has logic going for it and 'caught' is, I guess, just some kind of fish.
'Catch' is a word defined grammatically as an irregular verb (i.e. its forms make no sense). For a better impression of how many irregular verbs exist in English, here's another hoot from the Purdue Owl: Irregular Verbs: Overview and List
So, yah, tell me again German is hard to learn ... but think for a moment what a bitch-up we have made of English.
There some things English did well as German articles are difficult for someone learning the language as a second after English. All articles vary depending on the gender of the object and this is what determines the suffix for the article. 'A' might be ein, einer, eines, einem and likely more with all meaning generally the same thing. This has anomalies as well and an example is Mädchen (girl) but her gender is neuter. Perhaps this is a sophisticated Chomsky-ish linguistic tool to reduce the temptation for pedophilia but you can trace the history for yourself.
Something English lost but which has great value is the umlaut (e.g. ä, ö, ü, etc) and the loss is because it tells the speaker precisely how a word should sound. A word such as 'facade' makes no sense to me in three ways because each 'a' sounds different for no apparent reason and the 'c' becomes an 's,' also for no apparent reason. Much of my vocabulary came from reading and I thought for years the pronunciation for facade is fakäd.
Americans, Brits, and Germans are much the same and one example of that is in 'z' as the sound for it is something like 'tset' in German, 'zed' in English, and 'zee' in American. That tells me English kept a partial memory of its ancestry and American threw it away altogether to turn the letter back into an 's' which presumably is where it started.
(Ed: this crap really interests you?)
Yup. It's the same as with George Carlin as he said, "I like to go to the supermarket to see the weird shit other people eat."
So why do they do it.
Here some thoughts from the Purdue Owl Online Writing Lab: Using Articles
Who knows what Purdue does with an Owl but the bird doesn't know why 'an' is used with 'history' either. The article advises 'an' is appropriate when the 'h' is silent but that's not true for 'history' so the final answer is 'well, I just dunno.'
In use, it most often pops up with people being pretentious about their knowledge of grammar but really it doesn't show anything of the kind. It's not my purpose to find such people and try to shame them for destroying the language as all I would like to find behind this is some logic.
Tip: it ain't there
The above isn't all that strange as English abounds with anomalies of that nature. The one I hear most often is the past tense of 'catch' and just try to explain the logic of 'caught' vs 'catched' to someone who speaks English as a second language.
Cat: I don't say anything as being pedantic about using 'caught' is indefensible. All I can figure with stuff like that is it goes back to some kind of fish Chaucer catched and he thought it was important to say he caught it (i.e. it makes no sense).
Maybe I shall start using 'catched' as well as it has logic going for it and 'caught' is, I guess, just some kind of fish.
'Catch' is a word defined grammatically as an irregular verb (i.e. its forms make no sense). For a better impression of how many irregular verbs exist in English, here's another hoot from the Purdue Owl: Irregular Verbs: Overview and List
So, yah, tell me again German is hard to learn ... but think for a moment what a bitch-up we have made of English.
There some things English did well as German articles are difficult for someone learning the language as a second after English. All articles vary depending on the gender of the object and this is what determines the suffix for the article. 'A' might be ein, einer, eines, einem and likely more with all meaning generally the same thing. This has anomalies as well and an example is Mädchen (girl) but her gender is neuter. Perhaps this is a sophisticated Chomsky-ish linguistic tool to reduce the temptation for pedophilia but you can trace the history for yourself.
Something English lost but which has great value is the umlaut (e.g. ä, ö, ü, etc) and the loss is because it tells the speaker precisely how a word should sound. A word such as 'facade' makes no sense to me in three ways because each 'a' sounds different for no apparent reason and the 'c' becomes an 's,' also for no apparent reason. Much of my vocabulary came from reading and I thought for years the pronunciation for facade is fakäd.
Americans, Brits, and Germans are much the same and one example of that is in 'z' as the sound for it is something like 'tset' in German, 'zed' in English, and 'zee' in American. That tells me English kept a partial memory of its ancestry and American threw it away altogether to turn the letter back into an 's' which presumably is where it started.
(Ed: this crap really interests you?)
Yup. It's the same as with George Carlin as he said, "I like to go to the supermarket to see the weird shit other people eat."
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