[Gllug] [OT] speaking French in France

[Dylan]

On Tuesday 07 Sep 2004 19:29 pm, Pip wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 Sep 2004 19:19, Doug Winter wrote:
> > Just to score extra pedantry points (will I win the caravan?), it's
> > not any word beginning with 'h', it's words beginning with 'h' that
> > come from the french.  That's why it is "an hotel" but not "an
> > horse".
>
> Actually, it isn't. It would be if hotel was pronounced in a French
> style, but not when it's pronounced with an h at the beginning -
> hotel rather than 'otel. It was just a way of trying to sound
> sophisticated a couple of centuries ago when French was considered a
> stylish language, but it went rather wrong.

As it happens, "hotel" is most likely the very worst word to argue over 
here. The h- initial words borrowed from French do indeed take "an": 
honour, hour, ... with the exception of hotel.

Pip is partly right in that a certain section of the populus got the 
idea that the pronounced 'h' was wrong and dropped it from all words. 
When the fad fizzled out, hotel got an 'h' which it previously didn't 
have.

There are, of course, the orthographically vowel initial words which go 
with 'a' to consider...

Dylan

>
>
> Pip

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