#ALSO interestingly - this is the first year in which i've begun to transition to using sai paint almost entirely over ms paint

[vellichorom]

ok this is the year we retire the old template & start using new ones hello

( & SO, this template credit to @ necromosss on twt! (( date edited slightly by me, in case you're confused )) )

WHAT a year, am I right?

2023 opened the door to a lot more experiences, events, fandoms, people, & all KINDS of hectic craziness for me, but it was REALLY fun, & while I don't think I really made HEFTY leaps & bounds in terms of doing something different with my art, every day - with every small change & improvement, I come to love my art all the more.

& that, I will contribute some to YOU! yes, YOU - reading this right now! to casual viewers, to those who have been with me since the premiere of this blog, to those who've come around in 2023 for one thing or another; to those of you of whom I've never spoken with, to those who have made me something or complemented my work, to those who've become my friends, my gratitude is IMMEASURABLE.

this last year, while its had its bumpier moments - I will confess, it's been truly incredible, & I thank you, every single one of you, who's had even the slightest hand to make it so. you are all TOO KIND, & I appreciate you sticking by & enjoying what I do.

hopefully, I can continue to make things that grab your attention, AWE & AMAZE YOU, & beyond anything, make you smile, if only to repay you some for all the joy you provide me.

HERE'S TO 2024! with hopes & prayers & wishes aplenty that we'll be better people in better situations before it's over!

2023: JAN / FEB / MAR / APR / MAY / JUN / JUL / AUG / SEP / OCT / NOV / DEC + BONUS PIECE.

[vierschanzentournee]

I've just learned that in British English it's actually correct to say "an historian" and the reason we often say "a historian" is only the influence of American English. Is that true? Is h considered a vowel in British English or why else would you put "an" in front of a word that starts with h?

Hi Anon!

So, first of all I'd point out that nowadays I think it's equally acceptable (I don't like to use the term "correct", which smacks of linguistic prescriptivism and everything that linguists don't like!) in Britain to use "a historian" or "an historian". I was born and raised in Scotland, with entirely Scottish family, and I only really picked up on the use of "an" before an h a year or two ago (from a mixture of BBC broadcasters and, interestingly enough, an American teacher!) - I can't say I've noticed any of my friends at home in Scotland or at uni in England using "an historian", so I suspect that it's something that's dying out.

/h/ is a bit of a tricksy sound. It's usually defined as a voiceless glottal fricative - breaking it down, "voiceless" means that the vocal cords don't vibrate when you make the sound (think of the difference between voiceless /f/ in "feel" and voiced /v/ in "veal"), "glottal" means it is articulated at the glottis (the opening between the vocal folds), and "fricative" means it's produced by pushing air between a narrow gap without completely stopping it (for example, /f/ and /s/ are also fricatives). That seems simple enough, but the problem is... it kind of isn't a fricative. Wikipedia calls it a "transitional state of the glottis" or a "voiceless transition", and Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) suggest that /h/ is a "voiceless [...] counterpart of the vowels that follow".

Despite this, no, /h/ isn't considered a vowel in English. It's definitely not considered a vowel by laypeople, who consider "vowels" to be a, e, i, o, and u; and it doesn't act like a vowel linguistically in English either (for example, it can't be at the centre, or "nucleus", of a syllable - "bat" is a valid syllable in English, but "bht" is not!)

That doesn't really help us solve our question! I struggled a bit to find linguistic explanations rather than ones which just said "sometimes, British people say "an historian"." And so, I'm going to some theorising! Bear in mind that I'm absolutely not an expert, this is all guesswork, and also it's 12pm and I still haven't had breakfast so I might be a brain cell or two short right now.

English is a Germanic language, related to Dutch, Icelandic, Danish~Norwegian~Swedish, and, uh, German. Back in the Old English period (around the 5th century AD to the 10th century AD), English displayed the consonant clusters /hr/, /hl/, and /hn/ - I believe you can still find these in Icelandic today.

Then, in 1066, William the Conqueror does his conquering, and England comes under the rule of a (Norman) French elite - although English is still a Germanic language, it receives heavy influence from Norman French, a more distantly-related Romance language. In the Romance languages, /h/ was lost pretty early on, even before languages like Spanish, French, and Italian had begun to separate from one another. This might have influenced the h-loss seen in English during the Middle English period (10th century AD to 15th century AD), which included the reduction of /hr/, /hl/, and /hn/ to /r/, /l/, and /n/.

Later, in the Early Modern English period (around the time of Shakespeare), /h/ (although it was sometimes pronounced like the "ch" in "loch") was lost in words like "taught" and "knight", although it's preserved in the "gh" in the spelling.

It's possible the /h/ at the beginning of words like "historian" was pronounced very weakly for a time, and therefore speakers started using "an" as the indefinite article for these words instead of "a".

Later, the pronunciation with a strong /h/ reemerged, possibly due to what's called "spelling pronunciation" (imagine, for example, that we all started pronouncing a /b/ in the word "debt" because that's how it's written), but the habit of using "an" didn't wear off, particularly among conservative (linguistically, not necessarily politically!) British speakers.

This is also the explanation for the split in pronunciation between UK and US English of certain French words such as "herb" - UK speakers generally insert an /h/ at the beginning, although it isn't pronounced in French, which originated with the spelling, whereas US speakers generally pronounce it "erb", without an /h/ at the beginning, which is closer to the French pronunciation.

That got wildly out of hand, as things always do when I talk about linguistics, so let me know if you have any questions or if you need me to clarify anything!