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.
I’m a native English speaker, not fluent in any other languages, and I still fuck up it’s / its on a regular basis.
I’m under the impression that mistakes like it’s/its tend to be more common among native speakers than among people who learn the language as teenagers/grown-ups. I might be wrong, though, it’s not like I have any data on the subject.
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”
Really, we’re covering basic grammar now?
not everyone (thankfully) are american or british.
Yep, including me.
Still can’t get things like contractions, apostrophes, too/to, “should of” sorted out. Still plenty of need for reminders.
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.
I’ve seen a good 15 minute essay-video about this:
TLDW: English speakers increasingly use the consonant versions of “a(n)”, “the” and “to” for anything in casual conversation, just with a glottal stop to separate vowel sounds. This is then found more and more in written and formal language.
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
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.
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”.
Nah, i use whichever i feel like in the moment. Sometimes a double vowel sound sounds better.
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/
Y is a consonant ? what ?
Y can act as a consonant or a vowel, depending on the position in the word.
Definitely a vowel: Baby
Part of a vowel sound: Play
Not a vowel at all: Yes, lawyer
When a Y starts a syllable, it typically doesn’t take a vowel sound, closer to a “soft j” sound.
a soft J ? in english ? this is the first time I hear of this, are you sure ?
Yeezus/Jesus Yawn/Jawn Yoke/Joke
I don’t know phonetics (or whatever the right term is for “mouth noises for speaking” is) enough to say if y- consonant/soft-j is the closest pairing. As I sit here like a weirdo going “yo-yo-yo” and “jo-jo-jo”, they have a similar starting position, but soft-j definitely has that “ch”. I think maybe it’s closer to an r, like you/rue.
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”.
And don’t forget the napple!
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’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.
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).
Same with Arabic when Alexander became Skender and Alzheimer’s became zheimers.
just wait 'til you see what they did with “el lagarto”
I just learned the bit about an ekename from A Way With Words! Great radio program/podcast.
This is an great post
It is very basic stuff tho, anyone who learned enough english to read this post would’ve already been taught this. Except for native speakers maybe?
Carefully read the comment you’re replying to
I missed it. Appreciate you.
Cheers
Except for native speakers maybe?
Exactly. This is a less egregious example of the they’re/their dilemma.
Your, you’re
There is / There are (with the wrong pluralisation)
So often…so so often.
Dr Geoff Lindsey has a lot to say about this.
That was fantastic and a must-view for this topic.
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.
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
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”).
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 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?
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.
