It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").
I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an".
But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw&t=66s
Praline: 'Ello. I would like to buy a fish license, please.
Clerk: A what?
Praline: A license for my pet fish, Eric.
Clerk: How did you know my name was Eric?
Praline: No, no, no, no. My _fish's_ name is Eric. Eric the fish. 'E's an 'alibut.
Clerk: What?
Praline (in upper-class accent): He is an halibut.
The Pythons were highly attuned to this class distinction and wrote it into their sketches. Another good sketch is an upper-class family distinguishing "woody" and "tinny" sounds, but the whole sketch's premise is to laugh at the odd mannerisms of the upper-classes.
I think you have this slightly muddled. It's not that upper-class Brits
pronounce more of the "h" sounds. The idea is that upper-class types go
to private schools and they learn French, and so they know that lots of
English words that have a leading "h" are French loanwords and thus the
they are unaspirated in the original, i.e. the "h" is silent – it ought
not to be said. "Hotel", "hospital", "honour", "homage", and so on - no
leading "huh" sound. Which means that the word starts on a vowel sound,
and in turn, that means it takes "an" in front not "a".
But people who don't know French and don't know which words have a sort
of silent H on the front and which don't try to hyper-correct – so they
start inserting extra initial "huh" sounds on words beginning with some
form of vowel.
This is how old British TV comedies tried to parody policemen talking -
they are often working class but in dealing with lawyers, judges, etc.,
they are aware of speaking to someone from a higher social class and so
they try to speak more "proper" and insert loads of extra "h" sounds.
"Hin my hopinion, your onner, the suspect was hup to something."
Drop the "h" sounds where they _should_ be, and at the same time insert
extra ones where they shouldn't be.
I think this is what the Pythons were playing with. Now that Britain is
a little bit less class-conscious – and foreign accents are heard a lot
more often – it doesn't seem funny any more so it's gone away. That's a
good thing overall, I reckon.
(Wondering how long I should keep this up...)Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining
> Forever, I'm finding it very entertaining
Why thank you! :-)
There's reams of it on my late-1990s homepage, which I resurrected and
uploaded a few years ago. I did an extremely cursory update but expect
plenty of broken links and things.
Finding it is an exercise for the reader... ;-)Expensively educated people might pronounce French loanwords by dropping the h in an ostentatiously French way (and maybe making homage rhyme with fromage) to showcase their etymology knowledge and are more likely to use the grammatical convention[1] of prefixing them with 'an' rather than 'a' even even when sounding the 'h'. But the "correct", RP way their expensive education teaches them to enunciate the words you listed as English words is with a leading h and has been for a century or so, except 'honour' (also 'honest', 'heir'), which pretty much no native speaker pronounces the 'h' in.
[1]now usually an historic grammatical convention ;-) it survived longer than the silent 'h' in 'historic' in conventional English speech though...
On the other hand a leading 'h' is routinely dropped in spoken English in most words in many British dialects spoken by less expensively educated people (especially southern urban "working class" people), which has no more to do with French etymology than the glottal stop that means some of the same accents also drop a lot of 't's from the middle of words. That's where all the twentieth century jokes involving Cockney stereotypes overcorrecting by inappropriately adding 'h' when trying to speak 'proper' come from. The overcorrecting in turn came from "upper class" people being snobbish about the sort of person who 'abitually indulged in "h-dropping"...
As for the name of the letter, according to the OED and RP dialect the sort of expensive schools that emphasize correct pronunciation teach, it's is definitely called 'aitch' in British English. And has been for several hundred years. Not all people who pronounce it 'aitch' are "upper class" (there's a rapper with the stage name Aitch) but all people who are "upper class" are taught to pronounce it 'aitch'. On the other hand, it's a bit weird that the name of the letter doesn't contain the letter, so lots of British people whose education doesn't involve teachers emphasising The Correct Way To Speak feel the name for the letter 'h' should start with the letter 'h', hence 'haitch'.
Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)
So "upper class" learn to enunciate the letter 'h' without an 'h' in it, but are taught to pronounce it more or less everywhere else (with a few quirks to keep them honest) and others more likely to drop the 'h' sound from other words but add it to the letter name. Yes, English pronunication is weird
For those desperate for even more 'h' discourse, seee: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/h_n and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping
> Also, Irish dialects call it 'haitch'; in Northern Ireland it's apparently a shibboleth distinguishing between Irish-identifying Catholics ('haitch') and British-identifying Protestants ('aitch'). Suspect this also has nothing to do with the French :)
Fascinating. I didn't know that, despite my Belfast-born dad being the reason I'm a citizen.
I do cringe when people insist on "an + h" where the h is in fact invariably pronounced, as in "an historic occasion". You only ever seem to hear this from Americans trying to sound educated, which makes me suspect it's affected, not organic. I doubt the person giving a speech on 'an historic occasion' would then go home and give his kid 'an history book'.
Some people do in fact say "istoric", which seems largely like an affectation.
In Australia we pronounce the H more like "heitch" while in the US people tend to pronounce it as "eytch" (IPA would probably more descriptive here, sorry!). In the UK it's a bit more of a mixed bag, as others have already elucidated.
"Ambiguous" was probably a poor word choice, I meant to say that because both ways of writing are technically valid based on the accent of the author there is an element of freedom in the choice that tells you something about them.
A shibboleth is a little more specific: it's the pronunciation of one
specific sound in a different way that marks out a person as from one
specific group.
So, some of the go-tos... New Zealand English tends to turn an /i/ in
even stressed positions into schwa (the sound on the end of "little",
or "umbrella", or "gopher", and one of the key sounds to master for a
non-native learner who wants to improve their English accent). When a
Kiwi says "fish and chips" it sounds like "fush and chups", "swimming
pool" becomes "swumming pool", and this is _the_ way to distinguish a
Kiwi from an Australian, because to the rest of the Anglophone world,
NZ English sounds very like Aus English.
Canadians tend to pronounce the "ow" sound in words like "about" in a
way that to my British ear sounds Scottish: it becomes "aboot". So if
I hear someone speaking with an American sounding accent but they say
"I found oot aboot something," I ask them if they're Canadian. I tend
to find most Canadians and New Zealanders are delighted if someone is
able to tell, so ask very early on and you can make new friends. :-)Well, that, and Kiwis tend to say "hey bro" a lot ;)
Beached Whale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdVHZwI8pcA
I guess I have mainly met older kiwis!
I slightly know Terry Stewart of https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/
from mailing lists, and while I don't follow any Youtube channels as a
rule, I used to enjoy his videos:
https://www.youtube.com/@tezzaNZ
I probably heard more NZ English from Terry than anyone else!Those are also interesting but it feels a bit more special to me when it's a secondary speech characteristic because it feels a bit more like a clue in a detective novel -- it almost feels like you can hear inside the author's head and how they vocalise while they write.
In this case, "missle" is a malapropism that is only possible if you don't pronounce the second "i", and so is a secondary "speech" characteristic.