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.
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Truly an historic effort by OP
An Herculean effort, even.
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 investigationYou 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”).
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
Dr Geoff Lindsey has a lot to say about this.
That was fantastic and a must-view for this topic.
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.
Pretty simple enough for us Deaf folks.
I’m curious on what others’ thoughts are on this: do you say/write “a history” or “an history”? I personally use “a history”, but i’ve seen significant usage of “an history”. Do people not pronounce the ‘h’ in “history”?
Definitely “a history” for me but someone who drops the h for accent reasons, eg a cockney accent, would likely say “an 'istory”.
How they would write it, I’m not sure.
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.
Nah, i use whichever i feel like in the moment. Sometimes a double vowel sound sounds better.
Historic
An ‘istoric occasion (if you don’t pronounce the H)
A historic occasion (if you do)
It’s all about the sounds, not the letters.
I think the difficulty people have is when writing English down. In speech they will generally get this stuff right automatically, but when it’s on paper “a
historyhonour” can easily look right even though it’s not.EDIT - I am dumb.
How is “a history” not correct? The h is not silent.
You’re right, I’ve made an utter arse of that, ha ha! I meant to type “honour”.
A elephant?
