Correct pronunciation of historic
Here in the UK I have observed an odd change in perhaps the last five years and I’m curious to learn whether we have drifted away from or arrived at the correct pronunciation.
It seems that the “H” in historic has now become silent, e.g. this was an ‘istoric victory.
When I was at school I used to study “history” not “istory” so why the change? Surely the “H” should be silent in both instances or neither?
Although the h in historic should be pronounced according to several dictionaries I looked it up in, oxforddictionaries has the following interesting piece:
Is it ‘a historical document’ or ‘an historical document’? ‘A hotel’ or ‘an hotel’? There is still some divergence of opinion over which form of the indefinite article should be used before words that begin with h- and have an unstressed first syllable. In the 18th and 19th centuries people often did not pronounce the initial h for these words, and so an was commonly used. Today the h is pronounced, and so it is logical to use a rather than an. However, the indefinite article an is still encountered before the h in both British and American English, particularly with historical: in the Oxford English Corpus around a quarter of examples of historical are preceded with an rather than a.
So it seems that especially when the word is preceded by an indefinite article, the h gets dropped.
Apart from that, as WS2 mentions in his comment, there are plenty of speakers that will drop just about any initial h. I'm wondering if there isn't a named distinction between dialects that do and don't pronounce that h, similar to the rhotic - non-rhotic distinction.
In the U.S., there are some dialects that pronounce an ‘h’ in an unstressed syllable only if it follows a vowel. So you would say “two historic” but “five ’istoric”.
If you speak one of these dialects, both “an ’istoric” and “a historic” are consistent with this rule. Some people use one, and some the other.
I suspect that this was also the origin of “an ’istoric” in the U.K. I can’t say what is going on with this pronunciation in the U.K. currently. But I'd be somewhat surprised if people used “two ’istoric” rather than “two historic” there.
There are probably several factors at play here. We'll need to discount accents like Cockney where h is generally not sounded anyway.
(1) In general, an h at the beginning of an unstressed syllable is silent in most accents of English: annihilate, vehicle. (I think some Irish accents might sound the /h/.)
(2) However, if this is an initial syllable (say hydrate), the rule is disregarded.
(3) There are style guides that indicate that an should be used before h if it occurs in an unstressed syllable, which results in some newspapers recommending writing an historic moment, for example, and a perception that this is the 'correct' way to write the phrase.
It seems to me that it is possible that as a result of (3), people are not pronouncing the /h/, because it is difficult to pronounce the /h/ after an /n/. It also seems to me that in speech, the 'an' joins up to 'historic', giving the impression of a trisyllabic word, and if you apply (1) above, the h should be silent.
Speaking as an old-timer, the guiding principle (local dialects aside) is the avoidance of a double glottal stop. We never say "a elephant", "a apple", or "a igloo" because the word "a" ends with a glottal stop, and all of these other words begin with a glottal stop. There are some African languages which make much use of glottal stops, but in English, we always seek to eliminate one of these two stops. This is what dictates the use of "a" versus "an". Now comes the leading "h". If the "h" is aspirated, then it is proper to use "a" before it--single glottal stop. If the "h" is silent (in a non-disputed word such as "honor") then "an" is the proper article. In general, stressed versus unstressed syllables do not come into play between words (though, it's English, so I'm sure that there are specific exceptions to this rule). Nowadays, though, everyone seems to debate this issue on spelling rather than pronunciation. This rule of avoiding double glottal stops dates back to ancient Greek.
I live in the States, and have noticed a shift to "an historic" (with an aspirated "h"). As best I can tell, the folks who speak this way think it makes them sound educated--fail.