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
    1·
    11 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
        0·
        11 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.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    0·
    12 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.

    • los_chill@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      11 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
        1·
        11 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”.

  • Tudsamfa@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 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
      01·
      11 days ago

      just with a glottal stop to separate vowel sounds.

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