Oops, sorry for the confusion; I neglected to log in. I wrote that and I was responding to the person above who said that "an hotel" is correct grammar, without backing it up. As you can see, my argument favours "a hotel", not

American and British English differences have nothing to do with this. Herb is the only example of difference between the two. 'An hotel' is archaic but may still be used by old-fashioned writers. The rule that somebody mentioned above is

I always say 'crash' (British English).

It is often true that many private teachers touting themselves as native speakers abroad don't have much more linguistic knowledge than any other fellow countryman but the alternative is not appealing either: linguistically educated foreigners

Opinion is divided about this. "A historic" and "An historic" are both acceptable. You can use "an" before words beginning with an aspirated 'h' when the first syllable is unstressed, so 'an horrific', 'an historian' and so on, although 'an