[Voice of Arthur Fonzarelli]: A-y-y-y-y-y! 
If you listen to recordings of natural, connected speech, you won’t find 50% of people pronouncing the indefinite article as /ai/. The only context for that is when they’re demonstrating contrast (“It’s A answer, not THE answer” etc.). Some people might do that as an affectation, (to be more formal, because they think it’s more educated, etc.) but they stop pronouncing it like that when they return to normal speech.
Not so sure of this. I think Brooks’s is right and Brooks’ is officially wrong (cite?) but commonly spoken that way because Brooks’s sounds awkward.
I’m even less sure if that’s right. I don’t see that much difference between Brooks’ (which you say is okay) versus Jesus’ (which you say is clearly wrong). I don’t think everybody necessarily pronounces it like Jesus’s (Jesuses?)
Anyway, if I wanted to write the plural of Jesus, I would probably get all cutesy and write Jesi.
And I suppose that our two (or more?) terentii would each, individually, be a terentius, right?
One way to spot a PBS aficionado in the US is to ask him where he parks his car and has his morning coffee. 
I’m a certified teacher of English as a foreign language. I also work as an editor of scientific journals, cleaning up their English. Take my word for it, both of my complaints are legitimate.
Terentii, BTW, is the old Russian form of Terence (I have an MA in Russian from Middlebury as well).
[Sorry, I meant to write /ei/, as in the way we pronounce the name of the letter “A.”]
As an easy example to find online right now, you can listen to the first “paragraph” of the State of the Union address last Tuesday.
[QUOTE=Obama]
We are 15 years into this new century. Fifteen years that dawned with terror touching our shores; that unfolded with a new generation fighting two long and costly wars; that saw a vicious recession spread across our nation and the world. It has been, and still is, a hard time for many.
[/quote]
Obama used the indefinite article three times, and each time he pronounced it as /ə/.
I think he does pronounce it /ei/ occasionally in speeches (as many public speakers do), but when he’s being interviewed, he uses normal speech, and always pronounces it as /ə/. I don’t think British pronunciation is much different.
I know there’s an unconscious “rule” for this that we all use naturally, based on certain combinations of vowels, consonants, stress, elision, and so forth, but I can’t remember what it is right offhand. It’s the same reason why we normally say “The End” (long “E”) instead of “Thuh End” (short “E”). I had a drama teacher in high school who habitually said “Thuh End,” and it grated on my ears each time I heard it! :smack:
Well, everybody else says it originated in the 1857 edition of C. Davies & W. G. Peck’s Mathematical Dictionary, meaning a “mathematical condition of being at right angles.” They were American. The next entry in the OED is American as well.
Everybody here always talks about how awful Bryson is at things like facts. Apparently they’re correct.
OK, but that still doesn’t contradict the straightforward rule of using “a” or “an” depending on whether the following sound is a consonant or a vowel. If you say “historian” with an “/h/”, it’s “a historian.” If you don’t aspirate that “h” it’s “an historian” as in “an 'istorian.” The rule/guideline doesn’t change.
Well, the definite article (the) has no alternative form, the way we have two forms of the indefinite article (a/an). So there is never a call for adjacent articulation of a (/ə/) with any vowel at all, let alone a word beginning with that sound. For example, we never have to say /ə ə’fekt/ (a effect) because we have a pretty strict phonological rule, whereby we say [æn ə’fekt] (an effect). In rapid, everyday speech (as opposed to a pronouncement when a dramatic presentation is over), on the other hand, I’m pretty sure the adjacent vowels in “the end” can effective assimilate into one segment, resulting in /ðənd/, without grating on one’s ears. In other words, I think it has more to do with register and emphasis, than a strict, phonological rule.
Sorry; I should have given you the page number in Russell’s book–p. 382.:o
I have two other sources for this:
Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Incredible Era (Boston, 1939), p. 163.
Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man: The Life Behind the Masks of Warren Gamaliel Harding (New York, 1965), p. 162.
I know how reporters like to embellish the speeches and writings of public figures. :rolleyes:
The classic prescriptive rule we were taught in school was it’s a schwa before consonant sounds and a “long e” /i:/ before vowel sounds. Hence, “thee end,” but “thuh beginning.” Also, “the” gets pronounced as “thee” when it’s being used emphatically, as in “Tom Cruise, as in the Tom Cruise?” I also recall hearing that when it’s used in spontaneous speech as a hesitation, it also tends to get pronounced as “thee.” So, something like, “Bob picked up the… uh, whaddaya call that thing…the, you know, that thingamabob.” Those "the"s would tend to be pronounced with the “long e” sound.
There may be other observations and rules on the pronunciation of “the,” but those are the main ones I’m aware of.
Not necessarily. It depends on the level of accent placed on the “h.”
The article goes on to say
Like this author, I’m old enough to say an historical reference, especially when speaking at full speed.
If the original source is Adams that might be an explanation, since his book is reputed to be a hit piece on Harding and is accused of relying on dubious sources. I haven’t read it though.
Reporters certainly embellished politicians then, but to be fair, every quote by anybody was polished before it went into print. They even made athletes sound like elementary school graduates, though I’m sure that took a lot of work. If reporters had changed the quote there should be lots of evidence for it, especially in histories of newspapers. This should be a huge topic for everybody to signal out as a way reporters affected history. Yet there’s not a word I can find on it.
I think it’s a phony claim, made to discredit Harding. I’m more than willing to be proved wrong, but the lack of evidence is glaring.
What if you didn’t know that it was pronounced letter-by-letter as “U-C-L-A” and thought it was pronounced like “Ookla”?
No American politician says “an 'istoric.” They’re just ignorant and pretentious.
See, this is exactly why I prefer preserving the use of periods that are pronounced as initialisms rather than as acronyms and to downcase acronyms.
U.C.L.A. — it’s clear that this is pronounced as individual letters and not as an acronym.
Ucla — it’s clear that this is pronounced as a word and not as individual letters.
H.I.V./Aids — There you go. No ambiguity.
No all-cap initials should appear without punctuation between them.
Here in the UK (Would anyone say it as Uck?) we have a new political party called the United Kingdom Independence Party (they want us out of the EU). A year or so ago they tried to insist on U.K.I.P. as a set of initials like UCLA or NYC. Common usage dictated otherwise and they are now resigned to being universally known as Ukip.
(derogatory collective noun = Ukippers) Eng slang: Kip; sleep, bed - ‘he can kip on her sofa’; ‘she is still in her kip’. Thus suggesting that they are a bit dozy (sleepy, slow witted)
Well, there’s also another issue in that the proper noun ‘Mel Brooks’ could not require an apostrophe at all because it’s being used as an adjective. IOW the saying “I love Mel Brooks movies” being like saying “I love action movies” or “I love foreign movies”. Mel Brooks has both made enough films and with a very distinct style that using his name as an adjective is possible. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read the phrase, “I love Monty Python’s movies”, but always just “Monty Python movies”…
Addressed in detail in post 53.
This is an old usage left over from the days when the h in words like history, hotel, hospital, etc was indeed silent. It’s still not uncommon in the UK for the upper classes to say an 'otel, for instance.
This really doesn’t apply to modern American usage. There is no strong H/weak H phenomenon in American accents (or if there is, they’re extremely obscure accents).
There’s no good reason for an American pol to say “an historic.” They picked it up somewhere because it sounded fancy or perhaps they read something by someone who really dos pronounce it “an 'istoric.”