Man of Honour
[..]
I wonder if it could be area/accent related
Someone speaking the queen's English would exaggerate/seperate the A
whereas a northerner like myself whilst seperating it for A few and A dozen says 'a lot' like it's the front bit of allotment
I do know what's right mind. Just occasionally type it as one and no real idea why .
Maybe something along those lines, although few people have the "queen's English" accent nowdays. Not even the Queen herself, really. Everyone I've heard runs the two words together to some extent when speaking because it's easier to say it that way. English (and I presume other languages) is almost always smoothed together in speech because people want speech to be convenient to use. I grew up so far south that I would have needed a boat to go any further south. Sussex and Kent, close to the coast in both counties. That's as southeast England as can possibly be. I now live in Stoke-on-Trent, which is the far distant north in comparison, and I hear people from Yorkshire (the fabled lands of the unimaginably distant north, which may be only legend
) almost daily. I don't hear much difference in the pronunciation of 'a lot', but accents might be part of the answer.That still leaves the question of why only do it for 'a lot'? Running words together in speech is commonplace. I thought of some examples of it happening in the past, but I realised they were compound words from back when English was more Germanic and are therefore different to joining seperate words because they were coined as a joined word. 'woman' was the first example that came into my head because it's joined and the join is heavily smoothed. The original was 'wifman' (translates to 'female person' in modern English), which is cumbersome to say. But it was a compound word from the beginning.
