Quite a vs a quite, please help me

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
1

This morning when I was watching the funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II I heard someone say:

‘This is a quite different funeral…’
So what is the difference between this and

'This is quite a different funeral.

During the funeral of EIIR there was even a reference made to Queen Elizabeth I (EIR), namely to what they call the Golden Speech of 1601. It goes as follows:

‘It is not my desire to live or reign longer than my life and reign shall be for your good. And though you have had, and may have, many mightier and wiser princes sitting in this seat, yet you never had, nor shall have, any that will love you better.’

However, be that as it may what is the difference between my two sentences?

@Anglophile, @Alan, @Arinker, @NearlyNapping, @Torsten. Thank you in advance.

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There has sure been a lot of word order questions lately. :grinning:

The short and simple answer is that it doesn’t matter. You could argue that it changes the emphasis slightly, but that’s getting very nit-picky.

I think in AmE it would be more common to say “a very different funeral”. If you substitute ‘very’ then the second sentence doesn’t work. You can’t say “very a different funeral”.

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In my opinion, there is some nuance. In (1) the funeral is very different from the normal, while in (2) the funeral is very different altogether.

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