I gotta say a historic, I was always taught “an” should only be before a vowel or a silent h. Anyone else got ideas on this one? This one happens always in the news, as well as “an horrific”, but people never say “an house” or “an hippopotamous” do they?
It’s not the Briish that do things oddly, it’s Americans.
That particular one is due to Webster’s trying to create a “distinctive” American Language, out of misguided patriotism.
There’s an easy way to determine whether “an historic” is an affectation or not: get the person to say “the historic”.
If “historic” doesn’t pattern as a word with an initial consonant, “the historic” will be “thee historic” /Di.(h)Is’tor.@k/ as before a vowel. If it does have an initial consonant, “the historic” will be “thuh historic” /D@.hIs’tor.@k/ as before a consonant.
If the person says “thuh historic” but “an historic”, the latter is probably just an affectation. If not, that’s really their dialect and it’s unconscious.
(This need not have any bearing on how they pronounce “history”, since “history” is stressed on the first syllable and would therefore have more of a tendency to have an initial consonant.)
My idiolect definitely doesn’t pattern “historic” as an initial consonant word. If I mean to say “a historic” or “thuh historic”, I really have to think about it and make an effort - in other words, that’s the affectation for me. In fact, if I am speaking quickly, it practically becomes “thyistoric”, “th[sup]y[/sup]istoric”, or even “thistoric”.