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).

Reference

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

  • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    10·
    7 days ago

    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

      • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        5·
        7 days ago

        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.

  • Tudsamfa@lemmy.world
    101·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • Klnsfw 🏳️‍🌈@lemmynsfw.com
    6·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
      2·
      7 days ago

      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”

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 days ago

    Our mouths really want to flow vowel->>consonant->> vowel->>consonant->> and various languages all have their ways of helping that happen.

  • Tudsamfa@lemmy.world
    2·
    7 days ago

    I’ve seen a good 15 minute essay-video about this:

    https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ

    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.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      12·
      7 days ago

      just with a glottal stop to separate vowel sounds.

      You may say ‘dialect’, I’ll say ‘failed student’, potato, potato.

    • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      21·
      7 days ago

      perhaps because russia initiated a ukranian invasion on february 24 2022.

  • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
    1·
    7 days ago

    I’m a native English speaker, not fluent in any other languages, and I still fuck up it’s / its on a regular basis.

    • troglodyte_mignon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      no shame in that. it’s rough. fun fact: even the US founding fathers got it wrong

      he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither (Thomas Jefferson’s original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence)

      later prints corrected this error which happens three times from Jefferson’s hand.

  • Nougat@fedia.io
    102·
    8 days ago

    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”.

    • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      661·
      8 days ago

      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.”

    • Lysol@lemmy.world
      7·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • tamal3@lemmy.world
      2·
      7 days ago

      I just learned the bit about an ekename from A Way With Words! Great radio program/podcast.

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      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”).

    • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
      21·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
        1·
        7 days ago

        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

        https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=acronym

        https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=initialism

      • Tudsamfa@lemmy.world
        21·
        7 days ago

        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.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      21·
      7 days ago

      Still can’t get things like contractions, apostrophes, too/to, “should of” sorted out. Still plenty of need for reminders.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    15·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • Reyali@lemm.ee
      2·
      7 days ago

      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.

    • los_chill@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      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?

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        2·
        7 days ago

        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”.