A funny quirk of English I never noticed until I started learning Spanish:<p>In Spanish, to say for example, "he is a doctor," you would say "él es médico." Which more literally translates to "he is doctor," which feels unintuitive coming from English. Spanish DOES have an equivalent for "a" - "un/una", so the natural thing for an English speaker to say would be "él es UN médico", but I understand that to be awkward/unnatural.<p>But then I realized, when you say the same sentence in plural - "they are doctors" - you don't have an article. You don't say "they are some doctors" (I had to Google, apparently "some" isn't an article anyway?)<p>So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."<p>Unlike English - Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."
It’s simply that, in English, there is no indefinite plural article — or, equivalently, that the indefinite plural article is null. So ‘they are doctors’ is consistent with the behaviour of plural nouns elsewhere.<p>Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular <i>un(e)</i> correspond to the indefinite plural <i>des</i>: <i>La boulangerie vend des baguettes</i> ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: <i>Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins</i>. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.
Interstingly it is the same in german, you would say "Er ist Arzt" not "Er ist ein Arzt". Which makes me wonder <i>why</i> english uses an indefinite article there, since it doesn't seem to be either germanic or romantic in origin.
The further back you go in Indo-European languages, they don't have articles. It's a relatively recent innovation.<p>So for example latin didn't have them. Eventually they evolved from ille and unus.<p>Much of Eastern Europe still does not have articles.
The whole (over)insistence on using the determiners in general seems to be a relatively recent innovation as well, the articles being a large part of it. I am talking about constructions like "he shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet" — why not just "he shoved hand into pocket and pulled out wallet"? The context is pretty self-evident, and if you really need to specify some deviation from it (he shoved his hand into someone else's pocket, but still pulled out <i>his</i> wallet), you always can do it by, you know, using the determiners; except now they actually will be non-redundant.
> The further back you go in Indo-European languages, they don't have articles.<p>Heh, while we're discussing English, this annoys me.<p>"The further back you go" is a continuum, the effect you describe should be too.<p>> The further back you go, the fewer Indo-European languages have articles.<p>Or match a discontinuity with a discontinuity.<p>> If you go back beyond a certain point, Indo-European languages don't have articles.
I actually meant it as a continuum. In classical latin, ille and unus exist, but they are not articles. In the vulgar latin period circa 800ad, they are pretty close to articles. In modern romance they're articles.<p>You can't say "beyond a certain point" because what point that is varies with geography.
Certainly English can be odd. It can usually be understood through tough thorough thought though.
There is no plural equivalent of a/an. So where you would use a/an becomes no-article for plural nouns.
I suppose you could say, “they are both doctors” or “they are all doctors.”<p>Those sound fine to me, depending on context.
Over-learning Portuguese (as a beginner) almost make me feel that "He is a doctor" should become "They are as doctors".
In "They are doctors" the 'they' is the subject and you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.<p>But in "The doctors are female" you do because the subject is some specific group of doctors. It's singular because its a single group of things.
Is French different? Il est un médecin? Il est médecin? Ils sont médecins sounds fine.
What gets me as a non-native speaker far more than "a vs an" is the "a vs the" conundrum. I still don't quite get when something needs to be "indefinite" and I've been speaking English for close to forty years. My native tongue lacks articles altogether and it's soo bloody hard I feel hopeless I'll ever master them fully.
If there's more than one, and you don't care which one, then it's "a". If you care which one then it's "the".<p>"Pass me a plate" - any plate will do.
"Pass me the plate" - I want the specific plate which we were talking about.
That rule isn’t universal though. “I go to the dentist every year” doesn’t imply that I particularly care about a specific dentist (or, case in point, about <i>the</i> specific dentist).<p>“This was a nice evening” is also difficult to characterize as not caring about which evening it is. As are books titled “An Introduction to XYZ”, where both the authors and the readers will probably care about the specific book.
I'm going to the bank, the shop, the dentist, the pool - I have a regular one in mind and you may well also know which one I mean.<p>I'm going to a bank, a shop, a dentist - I've found a new one and I may well be about to describe it to you.<p>"A nice evening" - there have been ones before, there hopefully will be again, this was one of them.
Sure, but that’s different from “you do/don't care which one”.
Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a <i>separate</i> usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.<p>Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015</a>
Looking at: <a href="https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/english-language/definite-article/" rel="nofollow">https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/english-language/definite...</a><p>I think the usage falls into this group:
"The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",<p>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.<p>So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
Beyond that, there are cases where you absolutely are referring to a specific one, but use a/an.<p>"Our house has a pool" for example. There is a very specific pool being referred to, but it's sufficiently indirect that "the" would never be used here without radically changing sentence meaning.
Maybe it must be considered from the perspective of the speaker. He may have a particular dentist in mind when he says "the dentist" and maybe the listener not having privy to it may not be relevant.<p>And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".<p>Note: This is just my opinion and an attempt at trying to make sense of it. Purely subjective take as I usually refrain from making purely opinion based arguments.
There's an episode [0] [1] in a famous Canadian comedy that makes fun of this distinction:<p>> Brent: Ah, the tax man.<p>> Drey: A tax man.<p>> Brent: Pardon?<p>> Drey: I'm not the tax man, I'm a tax man. Saying the tax man is just a little dehumanizing, thank you very much.<p>[…]<p>> Brent: A tax man. And whatever you, don't call him "the tax man." Call him "a tax man" or he kinda goes squirrelly on ya.<p>> Wanda: Some people are sensitive about article use.<p>> Brent: About what?<p>> Wanda: Proper article use. "A" or "an" are indefinite articles. "The" is a definite article. In fact, some people say "the" is "the" definite article.<p>[…]<p>> Hank: I know what I'm doing. We get the tax man...<p>> Brent: A tax man.<p>> Wanda: Actually, in this case you can say "the" tax man, because you're referring to a particular person.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man" rel="nofollow">https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man</a>
I was going to start by stating the difference is “a” is unspecific, “the” implies the subject is already known.<p>However as I thought more about it I realized it gets a little more complicated. I’m not academically studied in English, though I am a native speaker.<p>For example if you say, “Our town has a castle” - that’s a specific castle but you wouldn’t say “our town has the castle.”<p>Why? It has to do with what the listener knows. “Definite” means the subject is known to the listener. If I’m introducing a castle into the conversation that you don’t know, I’m talking about _a_ castle. Now that it’s introduced, I can tell you about _the_ castle.
It's because the town has one out of the set of all castles.<p>You can also say "Our town has the castle", which... now <i>there</i> it gets weird. I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has <i>that</i>. Well I guess it's specific in that it is one of the few (specific) things it has going for it.
I would take "Our town has the castle" to imply that there's a group of towns that collectively only have one castle, and your town is the one that has it.<p>Compare: "Sacramento is the capital." You could say Sacramento is <i>a</i> capital if the reference group includes Albany, Austin, Tallahassee, etc. Or you could say Sacramento is <i>the</i> capital if the reference group includes Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, etc.
> I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that.<p>Yeah. I think what happens is that the implied group of things in which the castle belongs changes. "The town has the castle" could be understood as “there is only one castle and the town has it” (the group is that of all castles). But it’s nonsense. Your understanding seems right to me, but I am not a native English speaker. It is something along the lines of “among the things the town has, the only notable one is the castle” (it’s the only castle in the set of things the town has).<p>What is tricky is that the group in which the castle is unique is implicit.
FWIW all that is barely different from German (I'm a German native speaker). These implied groups seem like a nightmare if you have to learn how they work. Since I "just know", I've never had to think about it much.<p>Native English speakers, please correct me if I'm wrong about the "the castle" example.
"Our town has the castle" would mean that of (all the gin joints in) all the towns in all the world, only yours has a castle. Also not academically qualified, also a native speaker.
Not quite.<p>You use either “a” or “the” when you are specifying a class of things. “Our town has a castle” could be any castle. “Our town has the castle” would be a bit more rare and sounds weird as a general statement, but is valid in certain circumstances. “The castle” here means that the castle is something, or connected to something we have already been discussing and I’m referring to it, so the “our town” must be the new information. Like maybe we are discussing what we should do when you next visit, and I suggest seeing some particular famous tapestries. You say “wait, isn’t that castle [in which the tapestry is displayed] in Edinburgh?” And I reply “no, our town has the castle.”<p>You don’t use any article at all when what you’re talking about is unique. For example, “our town has Neuschwanstein Castle.”<p>Edit: or there is something which follows, e.g. “our town has the castle where they filmed Braveheart.”
If there was only one castle then you would save the. For example our town has “the giant duck” (fictional fibreglass statue)
As a Russian who's fluent in English, I feel like I ended up learning it mostly by example (Slavic languages lack articles, but we have other fun things for people learning them to trip up on, like cases). But a more general rule seems to be that it's "the" if you can point your finger at that particular thing or rephrase it with "that", otherwise it's "a".
What's interesting about the replies to this comment how readily people provide post-hoc justifications for language features that often have no essential rhyme or reason. The same is true for the prepositions which accompany verbs, which tend to vary by language, but for which every language's speaker will gladly offer you "rules" or "explanations" for when they fit. It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know.
It leads to some funny situations.<p>This one time I was at a company get-together and the CTO, whose son was just born, received some Peppa Pig merch.<p>I exclaimed (in English) "Peppa Pig is the shit!"<p>The HR lady stared at me as if I killed her father with an accordion.
I struggle with it too, but my rule of thumb is that "the" signals the reader they should know what specific instance is referred to, whereas "a" introduces a new instance.
When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I took a 300-level linguistics class called Structure of English. Half a dozen of us sat around an oval table in a little room and I was the only one not majoring in linguistics. It was a delightfully geeky bunch. One of the students later worked on speech recognition at Microsoft. The professor was an older tall thin man who always wore suspenders and a bow tie.<p>I had always been good at grammar in high school, but this was a different world and I had no idea what I was in for. We spent the first two weeks discussing the differences between the and a, and the next two weeks on the differences between this and that, and the rest of the semester felt more abstract. It was quite illuminating for me.
Ablaut reduplication is my favorite thing from linguistics. ( <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English</a> )<p>Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag.<p>It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.<p>Learning about the order of adjectives (big old red ball - try swapping any of those around) when I was dabbling in Klingon and the affix contests ( <a href="https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest" rel="nofollow">https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest</a> ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( <a href="https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix" rel="nofollow">https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix</a> and <a href="https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes" rel="nofollow">https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes</a> ).
I feel you. I live in Germany and we have many people whose mother tongue is a slavic language here and they all get it wrong to some degree.<p>I'd still like to encourage you to put some energy into getting it right because this mistake is very confusing for native speakers of a language that makes the distinction.<p>I cannot tell you how often I was listening to someone telling me a story about <i>the</i> thing where I sat impatiently waiting for them telling me which particular thing or person they ment only to realize they were not talking about something particular at all.
don't worry too much. english is such a muddled tongue to begin with that there are many ways of saying something "correctly" and few if any of us know them all. anyone who quibbles over some fine verbal point is probably not someone whose opinion you should value!<p>that said I know in business communication this kind of thing can be less forgiving. i will say that grammar and syntax checking for non native speakers is one of the few very beneficial applications of LLMs.
Same here. Every few years I try to go through <a href="https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm" rel="nofollow">https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm</a> to internalize more rules but it doesn't fully stick, and it's the only part of English that makes me self-conscious.
ditto. I never actually studied English, so I just YOLO the articles most of the time. tenses too, really. whenever I look something up, there are caveats and irregularities, and I give up.<p>I know, in my heart of hearts, that I sound painfully ESL to proficient native speakers, but they are a minority of a minority, so.
Just remmeber that "a" is short for "any". So do want the specific thing, or will any thing work?
But... "So do you want _a_ specific thing, or will any thing work?" sounds kind of correct as well to me. (Disclaimer: I am not native speaker, grain of salt and all.)
If only it were that simple. "I bought a car yesterday" -- Did I buy a specific car?
You did, but you aren’t specifying which.<p>“I bought the car” would indicate that you bought a specific one that is jointly understood.<p>In fact, if you <i>had</i> previously talked about a specific car you were thinking about buying, “I bought a car” would be a strong indicator that you bought a <i>different</i> vehicle than what was discussed.
Yes you bought the car yesterday - it’s the now because it’s established in the conversation.
The point is that in saying "I bought a car", you're not attempting to specify which specific car you bought. The fact that you obviously did buy a specific car isn't relevant to the grammar of this.<p>If the audience already has some context about which specific car you were going to buy, then you could say "I bought the car yesterday." In that case you're referring to a specific car that the audience is expected to already be familiar with.<p>I think some of the confusion over this seems to be coming from attempting to apply knowledge that you have to a sentence when the audience wouldn't have that knowledge.
<i>a</i> specific thing, or is it enough for it to be <i>the</i> thing?<p>sorry, just joking, this is not meant to be a genuine counterargument^^<p>I just want one of the new triple-cheese sandwiches please. And the salad of the day as a side.
Just curious, what is your native tongue?
My guess: Czech. :)<p>Native English speakers living for a decade or more in the Czech Republic (and picking up Czech in the process) may experience "retroactive article confusion", they may start to drop articles while speaking their mother tongue English.
My guess is something Slavic (since Slavic languages lack articles apart from Sorbian). I could be wrong. I don't think Finno-Ugric languages have them either. That's just Europe, there are plenty of such examples elsewhere — Japanese has tonnes of suffixes but no direct equivalent to this?
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This reminds me of “en” vs “ett” in Swedish. No rules - just gotta know
Der, die, das!<p>... den, des, dem. But those are derived from the three bass cases.
> What gets me as a non-native speaker far more than "a vs an" is the "a vs the" conundrum. I still don't quite get when something needs to be "indefinite" and I've been speaking English for close to forty years.<p>"a vs the" is quite easy IMO.<p>Most non-native however do not use <i>"that"</i> and <i>"which"</i> properly though. <i>"Give me the floppy disk that is blue"</i> and <i>"Give the floppy disk, which is blue"</i> are two different things.
I have the opposite problem. I speak a non-English language (poorly) that hasn't got 'a' or 'the' so I end up shoehorning other words into the sentence to take their place, such as 'one [particular item]' for 'the' and 'some [item]' for 'a'. I likely sound like an idiot when I talk. Non native speakers of English have similar ticks.<p>But (in)definite articles aren't difficult, you're either talking about some member of a group or class of items without specifying which one (a), or you're talking about one particular example or instance that is being referenced in context (the).<p>I don't understand how languages can talk about things precisely without them. I guess they just use context, more or other words in their place, or structure sentences differently. English just feels convenient in this case, but obviously I am biased.
Even languages that have both indefinite and definite articles use them slightly differently, for example Spanish, German, English and Hungarian have them, but the rules of their use is somewhat different, though the main idea is similar.<p>It takes time to learn things like "at school" vs "at the school", "to school", "to the school", "I know English", not "I know the English", but "I know the English language" etc. etc. It's obviously easy when you speak it natively, but it just happens to be a certain way and could plausible be in another way too, as other languages show.
The funny thing is is that all the examples you gave are correct English.<p>[I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school<p>[I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced<p>"I know the English" - I know the English people<p>"I know the English language" - I know the English language (specifically)<p>The point being that articles do a lot of work. They're not just decoration whereby there is some arbitrary correct form or rule. It's a matter of what you want to say.<p>But in the third and forth sentences 'English' is both a collective noun and the name of a language which is just a coincidence.
German speakers probably don't understand how English can affect sentence emphasis with strict SVO word order. In German the topic of the sentence comes first and the declension tells you if its S or O.
It's avoiding two distinct vowel sounds in succession.<p>Consider other variations of this rule.<p>In French, one would say "l'hôpital" rather than "le hôpital" because the 'h' is an aspirated breath (try saying "a aspirated" rather than "an aspirated") leading to an initial vowel sound.<p>In Irish, the word for father is "athair". To say "her father" it becomes "a hathair" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothesis_(linguistics)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothesis_(linguistics)</a><p>In Turkish, it can be seen with araba (car). "I saw the car" -> "Arabayı gördüm." (note the 'y' to avoid two vowels). Book is kitap and "I saw the book" is "Kitabı gördüm." Which doesn't need the additional consonant sound between the final sound and the "ı".<p>Whatever language you speak, it likely has some form of this rule.<p>And other languages have the quirk too (like the "a unicorn" or "a university"). For example, in French there's l’hôtel and l'hôpital. But if you've got the hedge... it's la haie... or even more egregiously, the marmoset is le ouistiti.
Starting earlier today, I've been using Firefox's local translation feature to auto-translate every page to Italian (to learn). I just had to remove English from my language list and check an option to translate English to Italian.<p>Firefox's local translation is pretty decent but not amazing. It did render this article's title as "Italiano: A vs. An", which I found pretty funny.
For anyone interested in getting "more 9s" from the heuristics and then building something useful with it, come join us at <a href="https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z32314" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z32314</a>
This reminds me of the multiple AI videos out there that I have to involuntarily listen to because people hate using earphones/headphones. They just start off like "The man/woman blah blah blah", and my poor brain is always noting that's bad English/grammar or whatever because What man/woman are you talking about? Where did he/she come from in this story that you just started telling?
It could be a gimmick to grab attention.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res</a><p>Lots of novels start off with "the gardener put down the gun" or "the elephant was never recovered" or "the money was meant to be in the shoebox" or something as a way of arousing the reader's curiosity, or making the reader feel like an active participant in some larger story that's already underway, even though this is technically bad pragmatics in the sense that it isn't cooperating with the reader's assumed desire to understand the context of the utterance.<p>In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
I'm always curious why sometimes I pronounce <i>the</i> as /ðə/ ("thuh") and sometimes as /ði/ ("thee"). I don't really know what governs this but I expect it's the presence of a vowel at the start of the following word. However, only some vowels. Does anyone have an answer?
I do this too - "thee actual" vs "thuh real" and such. I do expect it's to do with having a vowel sound of a certain kind at the beginning of the next work making you move your tongue in a certain way.
People taught me the a/an rule based on the vowel, but never taught me about this, probably because at school, the emphasis is on grading on the written language.<p>I just noticed that I do this change in pronunciation without even (and ever) noticing it, which is how I like to approach learning these rules, by pure exposure.
I grew up in New England.<p>My experience is that "thuh" is basically a lazy / informal pronunciation of that word.<p>But it's also by far the most common pronunciation. "Thee" would sound strangely hyper-formal, at least in my circles.<p>Edit: the sibling comment (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609</a>) also rings true to me.
The official rule I learnt in my English (as foreign language) classes is vowel = thee and consonant = thuh. That's it.<p>But I noticed that native speakers deviate from this at least in two cases:<p>1. Use thee to emphasize the following noun<p>2. When searching for the noun to say, they often get it wrong because they say something like <i>"uh, thee, thee, thee, uh, book"</i> and never sweat it.<p>Source: I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid and John Cleese does this all the time.
This is governed by the following word. "Thee" can also be used for emphasis anywhere.
> However, only some vowels<p>Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?<p>“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass<p>“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.
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I always wondered if some uses of the word 'and' I notice on occasion might have similar explanations, or if they were the result of misspelling, mistyping, incorrect autocorrect, etc.. anyone know?<p>Examples from published articles:
"Barely half and hour was on the clock"
"the hospital, which is in and area of central Homs"
"spiraled into and armed uprising and civil war"
"During and interview with ABC in July"
Fun fact an adder (snake) was once a nadder, and an apron was on a napron. This fun fact brought to you by The History of English Podcast.<p><a href="https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/" rel="nofollow">https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/</a><p>Happily sourced in Wikipedia so I don't have to figure out which episode I learned that from:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder</a> <- see below the table in Taxonomy.
> for some words, we use an. For example, an apple.<p>The rule is fairly simple as it was taught to me - if the word (apple) begins with a vowel sound, use “an” to avoid cacophony. Same way one uses “o” (means “or” in Spanish) but “u” if the next word begins with a vowel.<p>What matters is the sound though, not the character - so it’s not as trivial to algorithmize. Eg. A hammock, an hour.
"a whole nother" is one of my favorite linguistic quirks.
Confession: Whenever I hear an American say "an historic...", pronouncing the "h", I roll my eyes at the pretense. That's the only word I think I've ever heard someone swap in "an" for "a" before a pronounced consonant.<p>Now, if they used the British-style "an 'istoric event", that's fine. In American we <i>don't</i> pronounce the "h" in "herb", so someone here saying "an herb garden" would follow the rule correctly and sound normal.<p>But "history" with the full "h"? To me it screams "this person memorizes without understanding", or at least "this person desperately wants to sound posh but fails". It's the verbal equivalent of wearing a polo shirt with a giant logo, imagining if a tiny one is fancy, then an enormous one must surely be <i>exactly</i> what rich people would wear.
i think this post with more details would be a better link: <a href="https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/" rel="nofollow">https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/</a>. The graph of exceptional cases is particularly interesting.<p>(Besides, it clarifies the colour scheme — the red vs black went totally unnoticed to my colourblind eye.)
Any verdict for "historic"?
Both are being used and neither is incorrect. “An historic” used to be more prevalent in British English until around 1990, but “a historic” has become the standard choice now: <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historic%2Can+historic&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false" rel="nofollow">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historic%2Ca...</a>
Both occur, but "a historic" is standard choice in modern English.<p>Since most speakers pronounce the <i>h</i>, it takes "a" not "an".<p>Contrast to "an hour", where the <i>h</i> is silent.
It depends on if you're speaking British or American English.<p>The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.
> The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.<p>"The British" aren't monolithic and neither are our approaches to this.<p>I certainly don't say "it is an historic day" or "staying at an hotel" with the soft H, because to me, in the 21st century, it's an upper class affectation (I am from a middle class background and from the commuter belt 30 miles south of London).<p>I moved to a slightly posher place and I know people who do say "an historic day" (soft H) still but it's largely out of habit/age/schooling.<p>The BBC have stopped doing this, as a rule. The monarchy have moderated this aspect of their speech too — I am sure I remember the younger Prince Charles say "an historic day" with the soft H, but I am fairly sure he would now say "a historic day" with the hard H; he has been trying to progressively moderate his RP accent for the last 25 years or so.<p>ETA: clarification in reply to reply
The majority of British accents would pronounce the 'h'.
I have seen an American book, published in the 1960s, whose title included "An Historical Survey".<p>For me, on this one, if there's an "an", it pushes me to not pronounce the "h" in the next word, even though I consider it silly to pronounce "historical" that way.
I don't think so. This one seems to defy the rule.<p>"A his-toric day"<p>"An his-toric day"<p>Both seem to work correctly with American pronunciation.<p>Journalists and films seem to use "an historic" with an American accent, which breaks the rule but still feels correct.<p>For most words the indefinite article is clear. This one feels weird.
> <i>This one seems to defy the rule.</i><p>No it doesn't. If I pronounce the "h", then using "an" sounds weird. If I don't, then "a" sounds weird.<p>> <i>Journalists and films seem to use "an historic" with an American accent</i><p>Curious if you have a link to a video of this, I can't imagine it sounding correct.
I didn't know about "an historic" until I heard it from American journalists. They did pronounce the 'h' and it did indeed sound very wrong. I believe I first heard it from Rachel Maddow. I can't find any clips, but there are a bunch of transcripts from her show if you search up:<p>> Rachel Maddow "an historic day"<p>For example:<p>- <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47356492" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47356492</a><p>- <a href="https://www.ms.now/transcript/2013-11-21-msna738766" rel="nofollow">https://www.ms.now/transcript/2013-11-21-msna738766</a>
They do, but only because it's been adopted from British media and literature. You might even say it's a symptom of being over-read, if that's possible.<p>"An historic" is certainly used in the US, but it's wrong in all contexts.
An would always be wrong here, in the U.S. at least.
Depends on whether or not you pronounce the H.
I can tell you did not use AN llm to write this post. Thanks.
"if words starts with hones" fails for "hones" itself; I suspect that should have been "honest" in the code.
A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.<p>(Genderswappedstories.com)<p>And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.<p>Him always swaps to her<p>Eg it was him - it was her<p>But his can swap to her or hers<p>It is his -> it is hers<p>It is his thing -> it is her thing.<p>And her can also swap to him or his<p>It was her -> it was him<p>It was her thing -> it was his thing<p>And hers always swaps to his.<p>So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!<p>I had to write a very in-depth algorithm to work out the type of words surrounding the words - if they are nouns, adjectives etc - in each sentence to correctly guess the swaps. But even after that some were unpredictable due to word order keeping the important words apart. all I could do 100% reliably was to flag the ones that might be ambiguous to check. Of course now I could just get an LLM to check it!<p>Can anyone explain why this happens?
> Can anyone explain why this happens?<p>Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:<p>• The falling together of object pronoun <i>her</i> and possessive <i>her</i> seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both <i>hire</i>. I’m unsure how this originated, but they seem to be separate in Frisian (the closest relative of English) and were reconstructed as separate in Proto-Germanic, which suggests that it was due to regular sound change in the evolution of Old English.<p>• Later, it seems like the third person possessive pronouns were derived by adding ’s to the corresponding genitive forms (which ended up as the possessive determiners). So <i>her</i> became <i>hers</i>, but it had no effect on <i>his</i>, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.<p>Thus we end up with the paradigm of:<p><pre><code> | | subject | object | poss pronoun | poss determiner |
|---+---------+--------+--------------+-----------------|
| M | he | him | his |
| F | she | her | hers |</code></pre>
Holdovers from showing the case (function in the sentence) of pronouns with inflection, which has mostly vanished from English, but not completely. The "mostly" just means we get extra confusion from different cases having ended up with the same form (as in the two different meanings of "her" below).<p>"It was him -> it was her" -- both are direct objects (at least as you're using them here--once upon a time the correct English would have been "it was he -> it was she", since the verb "to be" is not a transitive verb, but that seems to have gone out of fashion).<p>"It is his -> it is hers" -- both are possessives, but they're not directly modifying anything (they refer to "it", but the verb is in between).<p>"It is his thing -> it is her thing" -- both are possessives, but now they are functioning as direct modifiers of "thing", which is a different usage.<p>I don't know if there is a fully specified algorithm for determining these things, and even if you got one that worked in English, I don't think it would map very easily to any other language, because English is such a hodgepodge of things cherry picked from various languages over the centuries.
This is one of the examples where English is perfectly consistent.<p>edit: OK, the ("a") "nvidia employee" seems to provide a counterexample, but is it really about names? I think it's about repetition, "an Nvidia employee" just sounds strange due to the "en-en".<p>But yeah, maybe it is a rare exception, because "an n-gram" is probably standard.<p>I'm perfectly fine with applying the rule to all other proper names? E.g. "a Microsoft employee" or "an HSBC product".<p>The writeup lost me there, when it jumps to hard-codes lists using this example as justification. AI slop?<p>> The actual rule is not whether the written word starts with a vowel letter, but whether the spoken word starts with a vowel sound.<p>The only exemption I know about is emphasis by pause, it allows to use "a" before a vowel sound in some exceptional cases.<p>So the rest of the goal description is solely about how words are pronounced? I mean that the question whether to use "a" or "an", and wanting to define a function that decides this, is equivalent to aiming at a function that decides whether the pronunciation of a word starts with an audible consonant or vowel.<p>This is described on the site, I see now. But it jumps to data science and statistics before even stating the problem accurately?<p>I still don't know what kind if "exceptions" it talks about, because it already treats things like "an HN submission" as an "exception", when it clearly isn't one.
I avoid making exceptions to the rule, but in the vernacular, people definitely break from it! You'll see e.g. "an historic event", usually justified because the first syllable is weak and close enough to being vowel-started.<p>FWIW "an Nvida employee" sounds better than me an "a Nvidia employee" because the latter has two vowels with no consonant separating them ... and I don't get repetition there because the vowels are different.
I notice "an" is in decline in some forms of spoken English. I noticed this shift years ago. Some English speakers say "a (y)apple" rather than "an apple" or "a(y) orange" rather than "an orange". In some case the "y" sound is replaced by a glottal stop (a' apple, a' orange).<p>[Why is this getting voted down? Bizarre.]
a.k.a. "hard attack". There's a nice video on the subject by linguist Geoff Lindsey: <a href="https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ</a>
No
I've also noticed this but it sounds kind of infantile to me. It's a common pronunciation that a lot of children make seemingly by mistake and then eventually stop doing. When adults do this it sounds wrong, but I admit I have heard it.
I've spent some time thinking about this before, and it provides a clue about the writers accent. For example:<p>"An 'H'", and "a 'H'" are both equally valid following this rule (by my interpretation), depending on how you pronounce the letter 'H'.
A/an herb, for example.
/heitsh/ vs /eitsh/. I think it's mostly Irish with the former.
And Australian, I believe.
I'm Australian, and I say 'A Hotel', and 'A Herb'. Until very recently, I'd never heard anyone ever say it differently.
"I think it's mostly Irish with the former."<p>Actually, it's a shibboleth. It used to be said in Ireland that Roman Catholic called it "haitch" and Protestants called it "aitch". "Haitch" is to be found furth of Ireland though.
Most English accents don't drop the "h" in herb, although American influence will change that.<p>But you can hear "an" used in phrases like "an hotel" or "an historic building", where the "h" is usually pronounced.
Maybe this could be used to track how some spoken language changes over time in a region or across regions.
As a non speaker, I really hate this rule
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