Tuesday, September 25, 2007

A Hypothesis

I used the phrase 'an hypothesis" below, following what I thought was the prescriptivism I was surely taught in 6th grade that a noun starting with the letter "h" should be preceded by the "an" form of the indefinite article.

But it didn't seem right, so I Googled the two versions. The results are thus:
Results 1 - 10 of about 756,000 for "an hypothesis".
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,070,000 for "a hypothesis".

And so wins "a hypothesis" ... for now.

No comments:

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...