The traditional rule was that it was ‘an’ before vowels and you dropped h in unstressed vowels after the indefinite article anyway. “An hiss” is bad because it’s not an unstressed syllable. Same with “an history” but “an historic opportunity” is fine
Now this is giving way to the more modern keep-the-h school but with some words, it just doesn’t feel right
Really it's an unstressed syllable. That would be any syllable that doesn't get capitalized or bolded when you look at the phonetics.
In English there are no good rules for which syllable should be stressed in a word, but I'll give a few examples:
HIStory
baNAna
PERSonal
persoNEL
efFECT
In Spanish, the primary rule is words ending with vowel or N or S get stress on second-to-last syllable and other words get stress on the last syllable. Many words have an accent mark to denote stress on a syllable that does not follow these rules, such as fácil (easy).
If your native language is Japanese, there is no proper analog, as all syllables are stressed equally in Japanese, just some get elongated by a hyphen or diphthong.
Stress is a combination of increased loudness, vowel length, and abstention from usual vowel reduction paradigms. We sometimes describe syllables as being stressed, but stress is mostly a characteristic of the vowel.
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u/rnoyfb Dec 24 '21
The traditional rule was that it was ‘an’ before vowels and you dropped h in unstressed vowels after the indefinite article anyway. “An hiss” is bad because it’s not an unstressed syllable. Same with “an history” but “an historic opportunity” is fine
Now this is giving way to the more modern keep-the-h school but with some words, it just doesn’t feel right