English Language & Usage Asked on July 28, 2021
One begins with a vowel and should therefore have an and not a in front of it. Why is it, then, that ‘such a one’ is what is actually said?
It appears to have been the case when the King James Bible was translated in 1611:
1 Corinthians 5:5
To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
Google Ngrams reveal that such an one is not absent, although not as used as such a one, in the publications of the 20th century.
Other questions like this one or this one do not explain why an is obsolete. Was the pronunciation different before? What changed?
One hypothesis would be that earlier orthography was considered to stand above phonology. Is that the case?
From Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer (2015)...
Other features of Shakespearean pronunciation include the pronunciation of the word one. Descending from the Old English word an, “one” was the stressed form of what would become, in unstressed positions, the indefinite article a. Our modern pronunciation with the initial glide [wun] did not appear until the eighteenth century.
A related issue discussed on wordinfo.com...
Occasionally in modern writing and speech and regularly in the King James Version of the Bible, an is used before "h" in a stressed syllable, as in an hundred.
Answered by FumbleFingers on July 28, 2021
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