I could understand someone wondering whether that was true, but what evidence supports that claim? As a wild guess, maybe putting two consonents together, as in 'an burger', is too hard to say and one is eventually dropped.
I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
Not every variation of grammar is equally possible or usable. It's a philosophical argument, a fantasy of (rebellion?), to reject all practices and rules and preferences as arbitrary and therefore to be ignored. Some are arbitrary, some are obsolete, but many have real reasons, value, and impact.
From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London:
"People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'"
"There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way."
http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/-talking-is-throwing-fict...
> I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
I'm saying the great majority of explicitly learned/taught grammar is not arbitrary or obsolete, but has developed from study and practical experience of what is used and what works well (and what doesn't).
> "An burger" sounds like a abomination to you and is more difficult for you to say than "a burger" because that's how you learned to say it.
That seems to imply, to me, that the rules/etc don't have legitimacy; they're merely what we have been told. What am I missing?
I was responding to this part of the parent comment:
> The a/an rules exist because they make it easier to speak.
I disagree with that. I can understand how an english native speaker would feel that that's a natural conclusion though -- because they learned how to follow the rules at a very young age. The correct form is easier to a native speaker, because that's what they know.
I'm not judging the rules / grammar. The rules are learned, but that doesn't assign a value to them.
That's an oversimplified (and therefore unfair) dismissal. There are 'correct' ways of performing muscle kinematics that stem from nature, and not nurture.[0]
For a trite example, consider the golf swing. There is a right way to do it, and the correctness of 'good golf form' does not derive from golfing pedagogy, but physiology. A competent golfer, I would presume, would also experience physical signs of stress from having to watch an amateur at the driving range.
[0]I am not enough of a language nerd to attest to a-consonant vs. an-vowel but it seems plausible enough.
I'm not sure why it matters if the technique is optimised for human physicality.
It does if you'd like to hit said golf ball far, or accurately. Likewise if the aim is to enunciate clearly[0].
[0]If I may take a presumption for brevity that this is the case, and that this is a reasonably valid objective of the spoken word.
You have to learn to speak english correctly, you have to learn to do a golf swing correctly. The beginner speaker/golfer uses the incorrect form most likely because they haven't learned the correct form. The rules don't exist because it's the easiest way to do it, they exist because it's the correct way to do it.
"An burger" sounds like a abomination to you and is more difficult for you to say than "a burger" because that's how you learned to say it.