"A" vs "An"

[Robert_Moriyama]

...Which leads me to wonder why King Richard III doesn't cry "An horse!  An horse!  My kingdom for an horse!"  :-)

<br><br>If he had, it might have screwed up the scansion by putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABles. Old Will S. bent many a rule to make things scan; dropping an 'n' or two wouldn't be beyond 'im.<br><br>(Anyway, unless you are reading the original handwritten folio manuscripts (literally 'manu' scripts, that is!), you are probably seeing the results of dozens if not hundreds of layers of editing, through periods when 'an horse' was acceptable and periods when it was not. 'Sides, Dick Cubed (a.k.a. Richard to the third) might well have been dropping his 'h's, so "an horse" might have sounded like "a Norse" ...)<br><br>An agressive digression ...<br><br>Robert M.