Why you should know: The ‘a’ vs ‘an’ conundrum is not about what letter actually begins the word, but instead about how the sound of the word starts.
For example, the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent, so you would say ‘an hour’ and not ‘a hour’. A trickier example is Ukraine: because the ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘You’, and in this case the ‘y’ is a consonant, you would say “a Ukraine” and not “an Ukraine”.
Tip: when in doubt, sound it out(loud).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Some modern English words have changed because the leading “n” from the noun migrated over to the article which precedes it, or from the article to the noun.
“Apron” was originally napron, “a napron”. “Nickname” was originally ekename (with the first part coming from the same root as “eke”, as in “eke out a living”). “An ekename” became “a nekename” and then “a nickname”.
I’ll chain on: This is why the english language calls the citrus fruit “Orange,” in a round-about way.
The Persians named them Narangs when they acquired them from Asia, which the Spanish turned into “naranja.” But when they crossed the channel “a naranja” became “an aranja” which eventually became “an orange.”
That’s happened in french and Italian too then, “une orange” and “un’arancia”. Wild.
Same with Arabic when Alexander became Skender and Alzheimer’s became zheimers.
Some examples of this phenomenon in French are “un ombril” -> “un nombril” (a navel, from the latin umbilicus) and “l’ierre” -> “le lierre” (the ivy, from the latin hedera).
just wait 'til you see what they did with “el lagarto”
Ha, that’s really interesting. Swedish has an interesting example of this as well.
Plural you (“y’all”, basically) used to be “i”, but because of an archaic inflection rule, there were often an “n” at the end of a word before “i” (like, “när kommen i?”; “when are y’all coming?”). Because of this, “i” eventually turned into “ni” since the n of the previous word merged with i.
I just learned the bit about an ekename from A Way With Words! Great radio program/podcast.
And don’t forget the napple!
This is an great post
Truly an historic effort by OP
I hope you get loose vowels.
(/j)
You can take your loose vowels and stick em up your loose bowels
An Herculean effort, even.
it’s been an honor serving with you
it’s been
ana honor serving with youFTFY
I so want to downvote, but will refrain. However the gross feeling remains.
I tip my hat to you.
With certain accents that’s actually correct
I don’t disagree at all but I know it bugs some people, so here we are.
I used to hate this but legit like it now.
I’m striking “a” from my vocab. Consonants also get an now. “So i gave him an knuckle sandwich.” beautiful 🤩
This is also true for initialisms, which are acronyms in which each letter is pronounced individually.
“A NASA project” would not become “an NASA project” because nobody pronounces each individual letter of NASA, they just say it as one word.
“An FBI agent” would always be correct, and “a FBI agent” would always be incorrect, because FBI is never pronounced as a word, and each letter is pronounced individually.
NASA vs NSA makes this more apparent too. For example:
A NASA investigationvs
An NSA investigationWait, you mean people don’t call the FBI the fuhbby!?
They will now!
You make a valid point. One initialism/acronym I can think of that can go both ways is SQL (Standard Query Language). You can either pronounce it as Sequel (thus “a sequel query”), or as individual letters (“an S.Q.L. query”).
I’m not usually that guy but this seems to be the thread for it. Initialisms and acronyms are both types of abbreviation, where you pronounce acronyms as a word (NASA) and initialisms as individual letters (FBI).
I’ve had meetings at work over this. I had to draw a flow chart.The separation between acronyms and initialisms isn’t as strict as you’ve described here. Acronym is the older word and people generally use it to mean both acronym and initialism, whereas the latter mostly indicates cases where you read individual letters.
What is the difference between an acronym and an initialism?
Both acronyms and initialisms are made up of the first letter or letters of the words in a phrase. The word acronym typically applies when the resulting thing can be read as a word; for example, radar comes from “radio detection and ranging” and scuba comes from “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.” The word initialism only applies when the resulting thing is read as an abbreviation; for example DIY, which comes from “do it yourself,” is pronounced by saying the names of the letters. Note that the word acronym is also sometimes used to mean “initialism.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/acronym
Really, we’re covering basic grammar now?
not everyone (thankfully) are american or british.
True, but this is really basic stuff. I think I learned this for English as 2nd language in primary school. We trust that people here know English well enough to understand the server rules, why then assume they don’t know basic grammar?
What makes this different from SVO word order? YSK how to use participles? Did you know about the order of adjective (That one is actually pretty interesting, but i’s not basic grammar so it gets to pass). At some point it is ridiculous to try to teach some grammar rules of English in English, and I believe this is well past that point. Even if one doesn’t speak the language naturally or have a formal education in it.
Yep, including me.
You know there are english speaking folks outside of the US/UK.
Mindblowing, I know.Only when it’s needed.
With literacy rates in America “hold my beer” low and getting lower, maybe there’s a need.
Example: if people pluralize “email” different from “mail”, they may need to review.
I like how you tried to be a grammar snob and couldn’t even get your example right.
What’s wrong in the example?
Edit: oh
I appreciate the tips. Even if they’re grammar related. I need all the help I can get 😮💨
Still can’t get things like contractions, apostrophes, too/to, “should of” sorted out. Still plenty of need for reminders.
The vowel sound rule (or a related one) is also used for which vowel sound goes at the end of the definite article “the”, that is, the sound the ‘e’ makes.
Usually the last vowel sound of “the” is a schwa, arguably the most common vowel sound in English, but before another vowel sound, it becomes “ee”, or what other European languages might write “i”.
There might even be an intrusive y (or j as used in Norse and Germanic languages) depending on the speaker. i.e. “The apple” may well be pronounced “thi(y)apple”, and a fellow native speaker wouldn’t notice. “The ball” has the usual schwa. As does “the usual schwa” for that matter.
I barely understood this but I’ve also tried to explain this very thing. I believe it was actually on a post about the pronunciation of ‘Data’ because I felt there were differences to each but could not explain why for the life of me.
I had never heard this spelled out or identified the pattern myself, even though I’d noticed there were differences. Thank you for sharing! This answers questions I didn’t even know I had.
What about when the next word starts with a schwa? In practice it seems like you change one or the other but not both: “The economy” becomes either “thee uh-conomy” or “tha ee-conomy” but not either combined alternative. Does this rule hold?
Schwa is a vowel, so it would be the long e, not schwa on “the”.
A possible exception is when the following word begins with a long e, and people might actually break the rule to make it clear where one word ends and the other begins. Or rather they insert a glottal stop before the vowel sound - I believe this is called “hard attack” - and since a glottal stop is technically a consonant, that allows the rule-break.
That is, something like “the eel” could go either way, but there’d be a very obvious glottal stop before “eel” if the speaker chose the schwa version of “the”, and they would have made that choice for clarity, to avoid sounding like they’d said “theel”.
This is the general rule, but you’ll run into problems with words that are pronounced differently with different dialects.
Example:
A herb / An herb
I’d say ‘an herb’ because where I’m from, the h is silent.
But there are many places where it isn’t silent.
A bunch of other comments are using ‘history’ of an example of this… but I’ve not heard of a dialect where the h in history is silent.
That’s not a problem at all. Your example proves the rule: it’s about how the first letter sounds, not what the first letter is.
Agreed, it does prove the rule.
…but that doesn’t change what I said.
If you’re interacting soley through text, you may get into a/an arguments with people who don’t know that different dialects pronounce the same words differently.
I didn’t say ‘this disproves the rule.’
Th’nk ofa som uk accents, lack’n the aytch, comin’ out 'istory & tha like
Well, that does count as a dialect, but I literally would not be able to comprehend it in person.
I have the PNW dialect, aka, the accent that is trained into every newcaster and hollywood actor, because basically every English speaker can understand it without difficulty.
The type O blood of English dialects, if you would.
Is that similar to Transatlantic speak? Transatlantic comes from pronunciation and pitch that carried well on poor radio signals preceeding the digital age. Meanwhile, I swear it was something in the MidAtlantic US that won most neutral English accent… Or most neutral American at the least.
Kinda sorta.
The actual accent itself doesn’t sound the same, but I think you’re getting at how it came to be.
The PNW dialect/accent is basically a subset of the Californian dialect/accent, with a few differences.
It arose as being very close to ‘General American’ because it was the last, or latest part of the US to be settled by significant numbers of English speakers, and is an amalgamation of the accents of English speakers from many different pre-exsting American dialect regions.
People from the PNW often do not even realize that they have an accent, as it is so close to a sort of normalized middle ground of other US American English accents.
TransAtlantic accent/dialect specifically arose because of the technology, as you say… and also I think a bit from social circles of basicslly upper class NorthEasterners who had enough money to regulalry interact with actual UK English speakers themselves, whereas PNW accent/dialect seems to not have arisen intentionally, and isn’t as strongly tied to the upper social class of the region.
Seattle and Portland’s first major population booms were the result of the Alaska goldrush near the end of the 1800’s, with basically lower class people coming from all across American (and other parts of the world) either using them as a last port to stock up and buy supplies before heading north, or setting up a business to sell those supplies to those people… and a whole lot of them returned to Seattle or Portland after the Alaska gold rush.
https://pacificupperleft.com/does-the-pacific-northwest-have-an-accent/
Funny. I’m a Seattle native so I too have the PNW accent. Fun trick to show someone with our accent that we actually do have an accent, ask them to pronounce cot and caught. We pronounce them the same lol 🥲
Trolling is a art
I can’t believe you would make such a simple and obvious mistake. The correct way to say it is “Trolling are a art”, ffs.
No, no, it’s, “Trolling doth be…”
Also interesting, in Ukrainian, the U is pronounced “oo”, so if we said it the way they did, it would be “an Ukraine”.
Don’t even get me started on the fucked-up anglicized versions of Slavic words. Fucking Kruschev and Gorbachev…
Kruschev
Actually Khrushchev. For some reason, х gets converted to kh. The rest is slightly stupid but at least understandable why it is so - щ was historically ш+ч, thus sh+ch (this pronunciation is still normal in Ukrainian, but not in Russian anymore), and the ‘e’ is just based on the usual spelling.
Uhhh I actually might need an example? Just one, though?
The Cyrillic character ё is pronounced as “yo”, but when preceded by some consonants, it becomes an “o”. It is consistently mistranslated and mispronounced by anglophones. The correct pronunciation of “Gorbachev” (Горбачёв) is “Gorbachov” and it should be written as such. The other, Хрущёв, is even worse.
Last time I saw someone say that anglicized words should be spelled as they should be pronounced, they were downvoted and shamed for being a prescriptivist.
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Don’t forget that ‘h’ is an exception and counts as a vowel: “a hat”edit literally i am wrong about this why did i write that
Give me an hour and I’m sure I could find a counter-example
don’t even need an hour. “herb” has multiple regional pronunciations and so can receive both treatments depending on the context.
also my original comment was just wrong i don’t even know how i got to the point of writing that. “an hour” is the standard treatment of words starting with vowel sounds—the letters themselves don’t matter.
but “h” is treated as a consonant. which it is. duh. i feel so dumb lol.
There are several people who will say “an historic” while fully pronouncing the H and acting all smug and proper about it.
OMG THATS WHAT I WAS REMEMBERING TY
This edit made me laugh
Don’t worry we’ve all been there
i think my blood sugar was low or sumthin lmao
Why would you use Ukraine as the example word instead of uniform?
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard “the Ukraine” been pronounced both ways often enough.
US ambassador William Taylor said that using “the Ukraine” implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[25] The official Ukrainian position is that “the Ukraine” is both grammatically and politically incorrect.
Dr Geoff Lindsey has a lot to say about this.
That was fantastic and a must-view for this topic.
The problem is not the rule, but that the many exceptions apply to the written word, whereas they are based on phonological reasons and the same letter can have several pronunciations in English.
yeah… like “a house” vs. “an honor” It’s easy: the +n is a binding sound to avoid a hard stop between two words when the first ends in a vowel and the second begins with one. A hard stop only applies to spoken language, so the +n should be applied where the spoken next sound is a vowel.
For example: “A “large hadron collider”-like setup”, vs. “An LHC-like setup”
I guess I never heard the accents that produced “istoric” in reference to the false americanized version of “an Historic event” such as any time Robert Picard (Richard Woolsey) appeared in Stargate
Upper-class British used to ‘drop the h’ on words with a french root to show off their education. Historic had a silent H but hawk did not, for example.
Side note: H has a silent H, it’s “aitch” not “haitch”.My understanding was that you say “an historical account” instead of "a historical account* to differentiate from the phonetically identical “ahistorical account”, which means almost precisely the opposite.
yeah this was kinda confusing when I was a kid because I was told that it was 100% about what letter starts a word. like an S for example. an… S…
didn’t help that my mom would argue that it would be “a S” instead of an, even though an always felt more correct .
Kids are frequently taught that letters are vowels (or consonants) when it’s actually the sounds they represent, and there’s not a 1:1 mapping between letters and sounds.
It gets even more (or maybe less?) confusing when you realize that the word for the letter S is ess.
You can’t use any article in front of Ukraine. Not even “the”. Just like it’s “India”, not a/an/the India. It is Britain, but it is also The United Kingdom. For India, you can use The Republic of India.
A good example for your case can be union. It is a union, not an union, because union starts with the sound yu.
Should’ve been “A Ukrainian” probably.
This. Until the above comment, it didn’t occur to me I used the wrong noun.
University would have been a better example.
You just wanted to use an unique example. It’s a honest mistake.
a Ukraine war would be greatly destabilizing for a European peace
