I am interested in the who, when and where of certain specific changes in language - grammar, usage, pronunciation and so on - that have occurred (or I perceive to have occurred) during my lifetime.
Some specific examples (there are others):
Before about 1980 I had always heard sportscasters say things like, “Smith is batting .296 for the season,” or “The Braves are 36 and 27 for the season.” Then around 1980 I was jarred hearing one of them say, “Smith is batting .296 ON the season,” or “The Braves are 36 and 27 ON the season.” Then ISTM I was hearing that usage all the time.
I don’t remember when I first heard someone use “AN historic occasion” instead of “A historic occasion”, but that too was a notable change to my ears, and now I hear it all the time.
The pronunciation of “homage” seems to have changed. Early in my life I had always heard it as “AHM ij”, but now “oh MAHZH” seems to be ubiquitous.
Each of these examples seems to me to have occurred very suddenly and then become common. I am interested in whether anyone studies this sort of phenomenon and where I can get information on who was the first to use the change and when it occurred. Like, who was the first guy to say “ON the season”, “AN historic” or “oh MAHZH?”
“for the season” vs. “on the season.” “on the season” has always been used, but it’s been increasing; more importantly “for the season” has dropped quite a bit.
Pronunciation changes are harder to mark. “Homage” has changed as people started using the French pronunciation, probably because of French Nouvelle Vague film criticism, which started using the term extensively in the 50s.
I did notice that in the 40s, people pronounced “falcon” as “fawcun.” Most likely, the pronunciation changed due to the spelling of the word.
Linguists do this all the freaking time. There’s a whole field, called corpus linguistics, which is all about taking great masses of text (newspaper articles, diaries, transcribed radio programs, novels, nonfiction books, etc.) and running statistical analyses on them to determine when specific usages came into use and when they dropped out of use. They also use corpus linguistics to track the history of grammatical features, and can do interesting things with them statistically, like determining if alleged quotes are more likely to be direct quotes or more likely to be written language modified to look like direct quotes. This analysis is aided by software libraries like NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit), which can do things like classify words according to part of speech and stem words (reduce a plural form to a singular, for example) and all kinds of interesting things.
I have never heard any say an historic with the h pronounced. It’s either “an 'istoric” (mainly British) or “a historic”. The only invariable rule in the English language that I am aware of is that the a/an distinction is purely phonetic.
The traditional prescriptive rule (i.e., that taught by traditional English teachers) for choosing whether to use a or an before a word that starts with h is as follows:[ul]
[li]1. if the h is silent, use an (e.g., an honest opinion)[/li]
[li]2. if the h is not silent, and[/li]
[li]2a. the first syllable is accented, use a (e.g., a history of the world)[/li]
[li]2b. the the first syllable is unaccented, use an (e.g., an historic moment) [/ul][/li]
Rule 2b is not as well known as it used to be and is now widely ignored. It was never universally observed in ordinary speech. It used to be quite common in careful writing.
Historic and hotel are usually preceded by “an” and the ‘h’ is enounciated, but no one except a pedant would raise an eyebrow at “a hotel” or “a historic”. The confusions come from the French for whom, of course, an initial ‘h’ is silent.
In my experience almost no British native would say “an otel”, they might say “a hotel” or an “hotel” but you would hear the ‘h’. No one would ever say ‘istoric’ or ‘istory’
Historic and hotel are usually preceded by “an” and the ‘h’ is enounciated, but no one except a pedant would raise an eyebrow at “a hotel” or “a historic”. The confusions come from the French for whom, of course, an initial ‘h’ is silent.
In my experience almost no British native would say “an otel”, they might say “a hotel” or an “hotel” but you would hear the ‘h’. No one would ever say ‘istoric’ or ‘istory’
Americans tend to drop the initial ‘h’ in herb, while we Brits pronounce it.
It’s actually quite common in Aus. I would say “an historic” is now the standard pronunciation, but perhaps it’s just the posh politically correct pronunciation.
The one that irritates me is “Schedule”. I know that it’s derived from a French word. I know that the legal system uses the ~French ~Norman pronunciation.
But when I was in high school in 1970’s, the only person using the soft “ch” was a teacher from a different state.
Yes, but on the other hand, Google N-grams does not include spoken language, and spoken language is usually where this kind of linguistic change begins.
In addition to the coding, that is the greatest value of the corpora you’ve mentioned above, which N-grams can’t offer.
So does that mean that in that one episode of MASH*, where Hawkeye was imitating the snooty Charles Emerson Winchester III, and said, “I want an harmonica,” he was actually correct?
I have never seen or heard of this rule. Do you have a cite?
The rule I was taught is “a” before a consonant sound, “an” before a vowel sound. Period.
I have never seen or heard “an hotel”, “an harmonica” or “an hospital” (with the initial “h” sounded). I suppose YMMV if you are British, but for American English 2b is nonsense. However, I have heard “an historic” many times, mostly on TV (as with the other examples in my OP), and I would like to know who started doing this and when, or, if 2b is/was real, how a rule that applies to so few words came to be added to an otherwise very simple rule.
My grandmother, who would be about 110 if she were still with us, loved conversations about grammar and usage. I recall her saying once when I was a teenager in reference to this very question about a/an and initial h, “you certainly wouldn’t say “a historical event!’” “I would,” I said. I believe she responded that I was obviously poorly educated.
But in fact that’s the only time anyone’s ever stated that “rule” to me in real life. And I’m more than 50. If indeed it’s “traditional” it probably began unraveling close to a century ago.
The Google n-gram chart linked in point 2 above suggests that you’re asking the wrong question. People have been saying “an historic” since before 1800, and most of the time this was the dominant form until about 1940, after which “a historic” powered ahead. But “an historic” remained quite common. It has never been revived because it never disappeared in the first place.
My WAG explanation for this would be that, in most variants of English, the initial -h- ijn “historic” and similar words was less voiced in the past than it is now, so “an historic” wasn’t the result of a separate rule 2b, but a straightforward application of rule 1. The rise of “spelling pronunciation” led to the voicing of the “h”, but of course this change wouldn’t be evident from written texts, which don’t show pronunciation. So prescriptivists developed rule 2b to account for, and justify, the prevalence of “an historic” in the written corpus, and the assumption that the written texts are normative led to the partial preservation of “an historic” in the spoken language, when it might otherwise have been expected to fall into disuse with the change in pronunciation.