Timeline for "A hundred" treated as one word in speech (extra indefinite article)
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 20, 2023 at 0:06 | answer | added | Corey Frost | timeline score: 1 | |
| Jan 31, 2023 at 3:44 | comment | added | Graham H. | @Rosy Sure, it's incorrect grammar, and it's incorrect in the prescriptivist sense. In the descriptivist sense, though, anything that can be observed as a natural linguistic usage can be considered correct if it really exists (and it does). | |
| Jan 31, 2023 at 3:14 | comment | added | Rosy | @Graham H. Oh, well no I haven't heard that, ever. That sounds a little too incorrect | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 4:17 | comment | added | Graham H. | @Rosy That's pretty normal. I think pretty much everyone says "a hundred." What I'm asking about are things like "an a hundred," "a one hundred," "the a hundred," and "that a hundred," which appear to have an extra word. | |
| Jan 30, 2023 at 3:47 | comment | added | Rosy | A hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion, and so on. I heard this a lot when I was in school, I bet even the teachers said it. I've never thought much of it. I thought that saying "one hundred" was kind of redundant. Nowadays, I just say "a hundred" when I'm exaggerating something. "There must've been a hundred of those things!" | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 17:47 | comment | added | Barmar | It seems like a back formation from "one hundred" (the normal pronunciation of 100), turning "one" into "a". So "The one hunderd yard dash" becomes "The a hundred yard dash" | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 12:17 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I really can't imagine any native Anglophone coming out with the first example above, but I certainly can imagine a kid talking about the events he competed in on his school sports day: I didn't do very well in the weightlifting, but I came second in the a hundred yard sprint. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 6:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglish/status/1616676969784950786 | ||
| Jan 21, 2023 at 4:51 | comment | added | Graham H. | @MarcInManhattan Thank you. I’m sorry if my previous comment was a bit snarky. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 4:20 | comment | added | MarcInManhattan | You didn't mention the rule in your question, so I wasn't sure that you were aware of it. That was the only purpose of my comment. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 4:14 | comment | added | Graham H. | @MarcInManhattan I understand how the rule works. Of course it’s not grammatically correct by official standards, but that’s not necessary for speech to be “acceptable.” Real, valid linguistic changes happen through “mistakes” like these. For example, the phrase “a nickname” is just a bastardization of the older “an eke-name.” Contractions are just elisions that language purists got tired of criticizing. Are those not “acceptable” to you? | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 2:59 | comment | added | MarcInManhattan | I can't answer your question, because I don't recall ever hearing such phrases, but note that a nominal phrase generally contains only one determiner. In your first example, "that" and "a" are both determiners, while in your second the indefinite articles are both determiners. Therefore, neither example would usually be considered acceptable. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 1:38 | history | asked | Graham H. | CC BY-SA 4.0 |