A funny quirk of English I never noticed until I started learning Spanish:
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.
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?)
So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."
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.
Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.
English still feels hard to explain when things sound natural and when they don't.
You can say "there are some vendors in the street" and it sounds normal. But if you were to say "they are some vendors" it sounds weird. It's pretty firmly more natural to say "they are vendors."
In the case you mention, I note that Huddleston & Pullum in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language specifically call ‘some’ an existential determiner. As is usual with them, this is an insightful observation: you use ‘some <noun>’ specifically in order to say that there exists some set of things drawn from some larger set or in some configuration. You say ‘there are some vendors in the street’ because you’re drawing attention to their existence in the street (and indeed ‘there is/are’ is the prototypical English expression for existentials). You don’t say ‘they are some vendors’, because the use of ‘they’ implies some specific group of vendors already known to both speaker and listener — highlighting their existence again feels weird.
(Of course, this analysis is still incomplete. At some point you simply have to list all the specific ways in which ‘some’ is used — which, indeed, is exactly what Huddleston & Pullum do. Furthermore I’m certain that there is some discourse context in which ‘they are some vendors’ would be natural, even though I haven’t managed to think of one just yet.)
Similarities between languages is a much more intuitive approach for non-English speakers. This comment just explains an English idiom in terms of English idioms.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether articles are a proper part of speech; the only articles in English are the and a. Some grammarians prefer “determiner”, which includes a, the, some, other, no (as in “no man”) etc. A determiner is just a word that selects/determines an element of a larger assumed universe of discourse.
Some grammarians deny the existence of determiners, as they are not found in traditional grammars of the language, with the words now considered determiners placed in other parts of speech.
Interstingly it is the same in german, you would say "Er ist Arzt" not "Er ist ein Arzt". Which makes me wonder why english uses an indefinite article there, since it doesn't seem to be either germanic or romantic in origin.
The thing is that doesn't even sound wrong and I don't think any native speaker would object to the article when used with a place of origin/belonging in a speech.
It emphasizes the statement if you ask me.
Only many years after learning of the speech I read online that it's allegedly "a gaffe".
To me, "Ich bin Berliner" sounds relatively neutral, or like a short statement. "Ich bin ein Berliner" sounds a bit less direct or a bit softer to me because you state that you are just one of the citizens of Berlin. But this may be just my feeling.
(In case you put the emphasis on "ein", you would clearly emphasize that you are just one of the many Berlin citizens.)
You are right most of the time for English, but today that should be "Arrr! He be the sawbones".
Spain had pirates too, but I don't speak Spanish so had to ask an LLM. It suggested that today in Spanish it would be "Él es el matasanos del barco". Any authentic Spanish pirates who can verify or correct that?
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 his wallet), you always can do it by, you know, using the determiners; except now they actually will be non-redundant.
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.
You can't say "beyond a certain point" because what point that is varies with geography.
I can’t speak about other languages but in my head the simplest reason is that English “a/an” specifies “one”, eg “I have a cat and two dogs.” I googled and confirmed a/an is Old English for “one” but otherwise they didn’t use articles. I assume it’s a similar origin story for other languages like “un/una/une”. In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
Try making it with "a" - if thing can be "a thing" then it could be "the thing" but if it can't be "a thing" it definitely can't be "the thing" either.
Weirdly, as an en_GB native, neither of these seems wrong to me. I suspect one is British and one is American, and too much TV has driven me to accept the American one.
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.
There's an episode [0] [1] in a famous Canadian comedy that makes fun of this distinction:
> Brent: Ah, the tax man.
> Drey: A tax man.
> Brent: Pardon?
> 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.
[…]
> 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.
> Wanda: Some people are sensitive about article use.
> Brent: About what?
> 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.
[…]
> Hank: I know what I'm doing. We get the tax man...
> Brent: A tax man.
> Wanda: Actually, in this case you can say "the" tax man, because you're referring to a particular person.
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 the specific dentist).
“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.
“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.
I believe it is food for thought — would one ever say "this was the nice evening"?
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
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 separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.
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.
I think the usage falls into this group:
"The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
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.
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.
"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.
And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".
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.
No matter how much we try to make objective statements, they are never based on "full, provable truth", and are thus opinions. Conversing with other humans is exchanging opinions based on their own previous knowledge. Thus no need to — when conversing with non-malicious people — state that your opinion is, in fact, your opinion. I appreciate it for what it is, and if I am curious about the basis for it, I will inquire more.
All of the above is in my opinion, but I never state that and assume a good faith reader will take it as such (here for demonstration purposes only :)).
So in short, thanks for your opinion, and I agree this is the largely the basis for choosing between an indefinite and definite article, also opening them up to inquiry ("I am going to the store" — "oh, which one?"; compare to "I am going to a store" — "what are you getting?").
Nope! Because "the" also refers to a class/category which is essentially the opposite of indicating a particular member.
For instance, "the bald eagle is native to North America".
There is also "The" in names; The Beatles, The Great Lakes, The Bahamas, The Bronx, ...
The role of "the" depends on context: how was the subject treated in previous sentences in the conversation.
"I see a bald eagle out of the window. The bald eagle is huge!"
In this second sentence, there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles, because the previous sentence introduces the topic of the sighting of a bald eagle. It refers to that one.
If "the bald eagle is huge" appears out of the blue, not preceded by any discussion of any eagle, that tends to bring in the class interpretation.
I learned the above through Japeanese. A similar thing happens with the は (wa) topic particle; I realized that "the" works in a similar way in that regard.
That much is obvious and everyone learns it like on the first week of English learning, of course. It’s the various cases where that simple rule doesn’t apply that are difficult.
"I play the piano"
And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!
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.
I was going to start by stating the difference is “a” is unspecific, “the” implies the subject is already known.
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.
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.”
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.
You can also say "Our town has the castle", which... now there it gets weird. I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that. 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.
Compare: "Sacramento is the capital." You could say Sacramento is a capital if the reference group includes Albany, Austin, Tallahassee, etc. Or you could say Sacramento is the 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.”
You don’t use any article at all when what you’re talking about is unique. For example, “our town has Neuschwanstein Castle.”
Edit: or there is something which follows, e.g. “our town has the castle where they filmed Braveheart.”
Fair. I was envisioning the statement "our town has the castle" outside of any other qualifying context about the castle. Like a couple of schoolchildren bragging about their towns. "Our town has a racetrack." "Well our town has a castle!"
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.
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.
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.
Same here. Every few years I try to go through https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm to internalize more rules but it doesn't fully stick, and it's the only part of English that makes me self-conscious.
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".
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.
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.
I cannot tell you how often I was listening to someone telling me a story about the 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.
While I am natively Slavic (Serbian) and my German is abysmal — you've never struggled with me I am sure, as I likely would not try a long story :) — I believe my English is sufficiently good that I run into similar issues with others speaking "improper" English.
But here I find it's mostly about trying to get into their linguistic framework when trying to understand them, and with my background of native Serbian being a very phonetic language, I can easily figure out when someone is coming from a more phonetic background: eg. or pronouncing "j" sound like "y" in "yay", more literal reading of other letters, etc. You obviously expect them to miss out on articles, tenses and even word ordering, so you work it all backwards. A bit like that trick for LLMs with broken, concise English.
So I really put it on me to re-process their language into what is the likely message they are trying to convey, and do not expect the precision of a native speaker.
It is hardest when someone's command of a language seems to be high (eg. they have great pronunciation and decent vocabulary), yet the basics are all wrong :)
And in some cases, it helps to know a bit of their native tongue, like with the Spanish and all of those "e-station" instead of "station", "e-static" instead of "static" (no, not "ecstatic" :), "e-sports" instead of "sports" etc.
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.)
“I bought the car” would indicate that you bought a specific one that is jointly understood.
In fact, if you had previously talked about a specific car you were thinking about buying, “I bought a car” would be a strong indicator that you bought a different vehicle than what was discussed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> since Slavic languages lack articles apart from Sorbian
As far as I know (and as confirmed by Wikipedia [1]), Sorbian does not have articles. Maybe you are thinking of Bulgarian, which does have articles (although the definite article attaches as a suffix to the noun, rather than being an independent word).
> Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate,
Is it up for debate? What is the argument against including Hungarian in Finno-Ugric? I mean, the "Ugric" part of Finno-Ugric is in reference to Hungarian.
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!
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.
> 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.
"a vs the" is quite easy IMO.
Most non-native however do not use "that" and "which" properly though. "Give me the floppy disk that is blue" and "Give the floppy disk, which is blue" are two different things.
My wife is Japanese and fluent in English but still almost always mixes up the and a. I think part of the problem is that it just barely sneaks under the radar of a mistake that is bad enough to confuse English first language speakers in everyday use. So theres no impetus to correct it
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.
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).
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.
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.
[I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school
[I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced
"I know the English" - I know the English people
"I know the English language" - I know the English language (specifically)
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.
But in the third and forth sentences 'English' is both a collective noun and the name of a language which is just a coincidence.
> [I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school
> [I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced
That's not the distinction that the OP is making. If you say "I am at school", it means you are a student, you attend school. If you say "I am at THE school", it means you are physically at the school building, without specifying whether you are a student. Both of those options are different from saying "at a school." See also "prison", "work", "bed". Similar distinction (in UK English, not so much American English) with "in hospital" vs "in the hospital."
As was pointed out, "I go to the dentist every year" doesn't necessarily mean a particular dentist; it just means some dentist, but we use the definite article anyway, because I guess we consider all dentists interchangeable? We don't use definite articles even when we are referring to a specific thing in specific phrases, such as "I went to Florida by [the] car."
Then there's highly idiomatic use of articles with proper nouns. We say "Buckingham Palace" [no article] but "The Washington Monument" [definite article]. We talk about "The Rockies" [definite article] but "Mount Fuji" [no article]. "Germany" but "The United States." Sometimes we use the definite article when referring to to racial or ethnic groups, and sometimes we don't, and that choice can have complicated social implications ("The Blacks", anyone?).
In short, if a native English speaker tells you that article use is straightforward, then they simply have not considered all the cases.
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.
Consider other variations of this rule.
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.
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".
Whatever language you speak, it likely has some form of this rule.
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.
> It's avoiding two distinct vowel sounds in succession
That implies that English added a consonant there to avoid double vowels, but it's the other way around: it used to have "n" always, same as other Germanic languages, and then it was dropped to avoid two consonants in a row
Non-native speaker here. To me in spoken language both "unicorn" and "hour" have a combination of 2 vowels in the beginning. Let me transcribe them as "ee-oo" and "aa-oo" here.
Why is the aa-oo combination at the beginning of "hour" considered a vowel but the ee-oo in "uniform" is a consonant?
I didn't get the unicorn thing either, but it's explained better in the longer post (https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/). Unicorn is pronounced starting with a sound like 'you', which starts with a consonant.
To me, the ee-oo sound feels more like a Y in my mouth. However if I really draw out the word slowly it feels like ee-oo. But in practice it feels like Y.
I would transcribe the first sound of “unicorn” as “yoo“. It’s almost ee oo but the ee isn’t voiced—it starts right at the transition between those which is what the Y sound is.
More generally, do you choose the article as if the first letter of the initialism were pronounced or as if the first word of the initialism were pronounced? Does it differ with acronyms? Does it differ between the UK and America?
an, because the spoken sound of "LLM" starts with a vowel, "el". So, pronunciation of first letter of initialism, when you're spelling the initialism. I think.
an LLM, an MP, an FBI agent, a CIA agent, a NASA engineer, an NSA mechanic, an 8 year old car, a 10 year old dog, et cetera – it's the sound of how you said those letters, always the sound.
I'm always curious why sometimes I pronounce the 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.
yep although I don't think it sounds too intrusive. it comes out as theeyactual while the alternative would the thuh.Actual with a sort of micro-accent on the A. I'm sure linguists have names for all these things, like when the movements of the tongue and mouth incidentally form phonemes!
It's similar to a/an, thuh is before a consonant and thee is before a vowel. And thee is also used for emphasis. But some people use a / thuh before a vowel. Do you have an example?
Hmm... I think it might be speed. I'll say "thuh apple" if I'm speaking slowly, and "thee apple" if I'm speaking quickly. Which is strange, because "thee apple" sounds more formal to me, yet it's what I default to only when speaking quickly.
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.
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.
The one that gets me is when people use "a" with initialisms, e.g. "She drives a RV," just sounds off to me. she can do her thing but I drive an RV.
That said, I think the former might be more common these days, so arguably the rules might just differ between written an spoken English in some dialects.
Every language has its own quirks. In Chinese, you don't have this a/an difficulty, but the grammatical tenses are so fluid that a lot of contextual cues are needed to make sense whether "I went" [zoule 走了] means I really went in the past, or I am going now (ignoring the semantic diff as well, since zou also means to pass away).
Actually, it does, it's just not so fixed about them.
For instance: "I have gone", "I had gone" are said the same way, but there is a slight difference when you say "I have been going" and there is really no way to say "I had been going" unless contextual tokens are added onto.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
english is my second language, but I learned it early enough that I didn't have to study the rules (and it more or less replaced my mother tongue).
Years later a friend who was learning english asked me the difference between "a" and "an" and I realised I had no idea. I know when to use each, but not the rule governing why.
Fascinating how different the experience learning a language can be when do you explicitly, through learning the structure and rules, versus via immersion where you know what's right, but perhaps not why.
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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?
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"
These are typical errors made by the native speakers. Most (every?) language has rules, which are more difficult for a native speaker to follow vs. a well-spoken foreigner.
Ask vs acks is just a regional pronunciation variant, nothing inherently wrong with it. I have noticed that a lot of people from backgrounds with enforced language uniformity (french and Russian speakers for example) have trouble with the idea though.
Very few people say "acks" instead of "ask". It's not a common error at all. I would say "who"/"whom" is the only truly common one you listed, though screwing up "than"/"then" is at least common enough that one runs into it with some regularity.
> for some words, we use an. For example, an apple.
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.
What matters is the sound though, not the character - so it’s not as trivial to algorithmize. Eg. A hammock, an hour.
> The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.
"The British" aren't monolithic and neither are our approaches to this.
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).
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.
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.
No offence taken — I just mean to clarify that the proportion of British speakers who do this an-then-soft-H thing is actually pretty small.
Having said that, there are two constituencies that do it, I guess:
- Those who do it out of upper class background or affectation: using the French soft H that survives in the American pronunciation of 'herbs' is a class signifier.
- And those who do it out of broader dropped-H slackness; it's not out of the question that someone would say "it's an 'istoric day" run together, in a variety of regional and rural accents.
So if you meant the latter, then, yes! Probably more people do it as a result of dropping H more generally than out of upper class identification.
But in the middle of those two, most of us, I think, use the hard H, and certainly "BBC English" has moved in that direction.
I have seen an American book, published in the 1960s, whose title included "An Historical Survey".
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 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:
It's one of those things American pseudo intellectuals do because they think it's more correct and want to sound superior. Maybe they heard a professor say it that way or read it in a book. Anything but actually process why the a/an distinction exists.
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.
"An historic" is certainly used in the US, but it's wrong in all contexts.
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.
Now, if they used the British-style "an 'istoric event", that's fine. In American we don't pronounce the "h" in "herb", so someone here saying "an herb garden" would follow the rule correctly and sound normal.
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 exactly what rich people would wear.
thanks for the confession, you are simply guilty of ignorance. I on the other hand am guilty of thinking the English and the French both sound pretentious about pretty much everything: they are both always judging people.
including "The Google Ngram Viewer provides an interesting look at the progress of “an historic” vs “a historic.” In 1800, “a historic” barely shows. It begins its rise in the 1820s. In 1869, “a historic” is neck and neck with “an historic.” The two travel along fairly close together until the First World War when “an historic” pulls ahead and dominates until 1938. After that, “a historic” becomes the clear winner, although “an historic” and “an historical” remain in use. Here are two recent examples of the use of “an historical” in the context of educated English..."
> Style guides like The Chicago Manual of Style, The AP Stylebook, and The Penguin Writer’s Manual regard the following as correct in modern usage:
“a historical event”
“a historic event.”
If you don’t pronounce the h, “an” is the clear winner. Now that most people do in America, “a” is the obviously correct spelling.
I feel the same way about "an homage". The H is normally pronounced on "homage" - for example, you would not say "pay homage to" with the faux-French pronunciation. So you therefore would say "a homage". It sounds so pretentious when people pronounce it the other way.
This is one of the examples where English is perfectly consistent.
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".
But yeah, maybe it is a rare exception, because "an n-gram" is probably standard.
I'm perfectly fine with applying the rule to all other proper names? E.g. "a Microsoft employee" or "an HSBC product".
The writeup lost me there, when it jumps to hard-codes lists using this example as justification. AI slop?
> The actual rule is not whether the written word starts with a vowel letter, but whether the spoken word starts with a vowel sound.
The only exemption I know about is emphasis by pause, it allows to use "a" before a vowel sound in some exceptional cases.
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.
This is described on the site, I see now. But it jumps to data science and statistics before even stating the problem accurately?
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.
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.
A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.
(Genderswappedstories.com)
And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.
Him always swaps to her
Eg it was him - it was her
But his can swap to her or hers
It is his -> it is hers
It is his thing -> it is her thing.
And her can also swap to him or his
It was her -> it was him
It was her thing -> it was his thing
And hers always swaps to his.
So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!
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!
Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:
• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. 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.
• 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 her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.
Thus we end up with the paradigm of:
| | subject | object | poss pronoun | poss determiner |
|---+---------+--------+--------------+-----------------|
| M | he | him | his |
| F | she | her | hers |
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).
"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).
"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).
"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.
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.
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).
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.
It might be regional? I haven't noticed it in the northeastern US, or in the multinational company I work at, where I talk regularly with people from at least 10 countries.
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.
A funny quirk of English I never noticed until I started learning Spanish:
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.
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?)
So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."
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.
Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.
English still feels hard to explain when things sound natural and when they don't.
You can say "there are some vendors in the street" and it sounds normal. But if you were to say "they are some vendors" it sounds weird. It's pretty firmly more natural to say "they are vendors."
Oh, certainly, as is the case for any language!
In the case you mention, I note that Huddleston & Pullum in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language specifically call ‘some’ an existential determiner. As is usual with them, this is an insightful observation: you use ‘some <noun>’ specifically in order to say that there exists some set of things drawn from some larger set or in some configuration. You say ‘there are some vendors in the street’ because you’re drawing attention to their existence in the street (and indeed ‘there is/are’ is the prototypical English expression for existentials). You don’t say ‘they are some vendors’, because the use of ‘they’ implies some specific group of vendors already known to both speaker and listener — highlighting their existence again feels weird.
(Of course, this analysis is still incomplete. At some point you simply have to list all the specific ways in which ‘some’ is used — which, indeed, is exactly what Huddleston & Pullum do. Furthermore I’m certain that there is some discourse context in which ‘they are some vendors’ would be natural, even though I haven’t managed to think of one just yet.)
I'm not sure this is the best achievable example, but maybe:
"The street vendors have decided to oppose the ordinance."
"But I thought Mike and Jacob said they support the ordinance. And Julia! Aren't they vendors?"
"They are some vendors, but most vendors take the opposite position."
That one is more natural without the word "some" imo
I agree, so it's still not an ideal example.
More simply: "Some vendors support the ordinance, but most oppose it."
And “they are some vendors” usually actually means “they are excellent vendors”!
Really depends on how you say “some”
I will die on the hill that "SOME PIG" from Charlotte's Web was merely an existential determiner.
You should not look at superficial similarities between languages, but at logic.
To the question: "What is he?", the answer can be "He is married, tall, doctor in medicine".
On another point of view, "He is a doctor" = "one in the set of the doctors". (But which one of the crowd there? The tall on is the doctor.)
With different expressions, you are not expressing the same thing, but different ideas (some of them more preponderant in use in a territory).
Similarities between languages is a much more intuitive approach for non-English speakers. This comment just explains an English idiom in terms of English idioms.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether articles are a proper part of speech; the only articles in English are the and a. Some grammarians prefer “determiner”, which includes a, the, some, other, no (as in “no man”) etc. A determiner is just a word that selects/determines an element of a larger assumed universe of discourse.
Some grammarians deny the existence of determiners, as they are not found in traditional grammars of the language, with the words now considered determiners placed in other parts of speech.
Interstingly it is the same in german, you would say "Er ist Arzt" not "Er ist ein Arzt". Which makes me wonder why english uses an indefinite article there, since it doesn't seem to be either germanic or romantic in origin.
This was the root of the overblown Kennedy gaffe where he said “ich bin ein Berliner” instead of “ich bin berliner.”
The thing is that doesn't even sound wrong and I don't think any native speaker would object to the article when used with a place of origin/belonging in a speech.
It emphasizes the statement if you ask me.
Only many years after learning of the speech I read online that it's allegedly "a gaffe".
To me, "Ich bin Berliner" sounds relatively neutral, or like a short statement. "Ich bin ein Berliner" sounds a bit less direct or a bit softer to me because you state that you are just one of the citizens of Berlin. But this may be just my feeling.
(In case you put the emphasis on "ein", you would clearly emphasize that you are just one of the many Berlin citizens.)
You are right most of the time for English, but today that should be "Arrr! He be the sawbones".
Spain had pirates too, but I don't speak Spanish so had to ask an LLM. It suggested that today in Spanish it would be "Él es el matasanos del barco". Any authentic Spanish pirates who can verify or correct that?
Not a pirate but a Spanish speaker.
Interestingly,
He's a doctor [in general] -> el es médico
He's the ship's doctor [this specific ship] -> el es el médico del barco
He's a ship doctor [generally works in ships] -> el es médico de barco
Certainly English can be odd. It can usually be understood through tough thorough thought though.
> Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."
Here the 'a' is shifting position to become the world final 's'
It is not the set-pertinence that would get transformed into a plural.
The further back you go in Indo-European languages, they don't have articles. It's a relatively recent innovation.
So for example latin didn't have them. Eventually they evolved from ille and unus.
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 his wallet), you always can do it by, you know, using the determiners; except now they actually will be non-redundant.
Indeed that begins to sound like so called caveman talk. He shove hand in pocket and pull out wallet.
And yet e.g. włożył rękę do kieszeni i wyjął portfel is a pretty natural-sounding Polish sentence. Grug trusts others not stupid.
> The further back you go in Indo-European languages, they don't have articles.
Heh, while we're discussing English, this annoys me.
"The further back you go" is a continuum, the effect you describe should be too.
> The further back you go, the fewer Indo-European languages have articles.
Or match a discontinuity with a discontinuity.
> 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.
You can't say "beyond a certain point" because what point that is varies with geography.
There is no plural equivalent of a/an. So where you would use a/an becomes no-article for plural nouns.
You can say "they are the doctors" -- but yeah it's a slightly different meaning.
BTW in German, it's a fun distinction. The old "ich bin (ein) Berliner". (or hamburger or frankfurter...)
I suppose you could say, “they are both doctors” or “they are all doctors.”
Those sound fine to me, depending on context.
Yes, but then it may sound as if "both/all" is being highlighted which it isn't in the neutral "they are doctors" statement
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.
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.
> you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.
But why not? Plural indefinite article exists in some languages, why not in English?
I can’t speak about other languages but in my head the simplest reason is that English “a/an” specifies “one”, eg “I have a cat and two dogs.” I googled and confirmed a/an is Old English for “one” but otherwise they didn’t use articles. I assume it’s a similar origin story for other languages like “un/una/une”. In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
Is French different? Il est un médecin? Il est médecin? Ils sont médecins sounds fine.
Nope, it's basically as in spanish:
> Il est un médecin?
Nope that's bogus french: you say "il est médecin". But you can say: "c'est un médecin".
> That's bogus
To expand a bit, it's a perfectly valid use, but most people will forgo having an extra word that has no role in the phrase.
"Il est médecin" and "Il est un médecin" are perfectly equivalent so people will choose the shorter.
The "un" comes back when using the noun as an adjective isn't possible anymore, e.g. by adding an actual adjective "Il est un bon médecin"
The most problematic for me as a non-native has been "the" vs "nothing", i.e. when one can/should put the definite article.
Pre-LLM I was joking that real AI is whatever can make that decision correctly 100% of times.
How do you feel about adjective ordering rules? I always wondered what this was like from the outside.
Try making it with "a" - if thing can be "a thing" then it could be "the thing" but if it can't be "a thing" it definitely can't be "the thing" either.
Right on the money!
"I play the piano" or "I play piano"?
Weirdly, as an en_GB native, neither of these seems wrong to me. I suspect one is British and one is American, and too much TV has driven me to accept the American one.
As a patron of the 405, there is no consensus.
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.
There's an episode [0] [1] in a famous Canadian comedy that makes fun of this distinction:
> Brent: Ah, the tax man.
> Drey: A tax man.
> Brent: Pardon?
> 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.
[…]
> 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.
> Wanda: Some people are sensitive about article use.
> Brent: About what?
> 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.
[…]
> Hank: I know what I'm doing. We get the tax man...
> Brent: A tax man.
> Wanda: Actually, in this case you can say "the" tax man, because you're referring to a particular person.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/
[1]: https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man
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".
"Pass me a plate" - any plate will do. "Pass me the plate" - I want the specific plate which we were talking about.
This doesn't touch place names. The Hague, Amsterdam, The Maldives, Australia, The Netherlands, France...
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 the specific dentist).
“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.
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.
"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”.
“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.
I believe it is food for thought — would one ever say "this was the nice evening"?
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
“At the start of the year, my crystal ball told me that all my evenings this year are going to be bad except for one. This was the nice evening.”
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 separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015
Looking at: https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/english-language/definite...
I think the usage falls into this group: "The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
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.
So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to.
But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.
I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.
Beyond that, there are cases where you absolutely are referring to a specific one, but use a/an.
"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.
This doesn’t count because the determination of which house you mean is not based on previous context, but only on the sentence itself.
I understand this mostly as "our house is one of a set of houses with pools", which is what anybody cares about in this sentence.
It's like saying "our house has a roof" — very similar, but nobody really cares about the roof, the focus remains on the house.
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.
And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".
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.
No matter how much we try to make objective statements, they are never based on "full, provable truth", and are thus opinions. Conversing with other humans is exchanging opinions based on their own previous knowledge. Thus no need to — when conversing with non-malicious people — state that your opinion is, in fact, your opinion. I appreciate it for what it is, and if I am curious about the basis for it, I will inquire more.
All of the above is in my opinion, but I never state that and assume a good faith reader will take it as such (here for demonstration purposes only :)).
So in short, thanks for your opinion, and I agree this is the largely the basis for choosing between an indefinite and definite article, also opening them up to inquiry ("I am going to the store" — "oh, which one?"; compare to "I am going to a store" — "what are you getting?").
Nope! Because "the" also refers to a class/category which is essentially the opposite of indicating a particular member.
For instance, "the bald eagle is native to North America".
There is also "The" in names; The Beatles, The Great Lakes, The Bahamas, The Bronx, ...
The role of "the" depends on context: how was the subject treated in previous sentences in the conversation.
"I see a bald eagle out of the window. The bald eagle is huge!"
In this second sentence, there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles, because the previous sentence introduces the topic of the sighting of a bald eagle. It refers to that one.
If "the bald eagle is huge" appears out of the blue, not preceded by any discussion of any eagle, that tends to bring in the class interpretation.
I learned the above through Japeanese. A similar thing happens with the は (wa) topic particle; I realized that "the" works in a similar way in that regard.
That much is obvious and everyone learns it like on the first week of English learning, of course. It’s the various cases where that simple rule doesn’t apply that are difficult.
"I play the piano"
And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!
And "There is a piano in the lobby."
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.
Usually happens when a person answers a "why" question to something they did without thinking.
I was going to start by stating the difference is “a” is unspecific, “the” implies the subject is already known.
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.
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.”
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.
You can also say "Our town has the castle", which... now there it gets weird. I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that. 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.
Compare: "Sacramento is the capital." You could say Sacramento is a capital if the reference group includes Albany, Austin, Tallahassee, etc. Or you could say Sacramento is the capital if the reference group includes Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, etc.
Yeah, I think this is the same case as the example above by someone else: "Our house has a pool". I offer "Our house has a roof" as well.
Speaking of the house or town, the important information is what class it belongs to, not the specific castle/pool/roof...
As you point out, "the" will have a very specific, highlighting meaning in that case.
> I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that.
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).
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.
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.
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.”
You don’t use any article at all when what you’re talking about is unique. For example, “our town has Neuschwanstein Castle.”
Edit: or there is something which follows, e.g. “our town has the castle where they filmed Braveheart.”
Fair. I was envisioning the statement "our town has the castle" outside of any other qualifying context about the castle. Like a couple of schoolchildren bragging about their towns. "Our town has a racetrack." "Well our town has a castle!"
If there was only one castle then you would save the. For example our town has “the giant duck” (fictional fibreglass statue)
I don't know... "What sets your town apart from all the others?" "It had a giant fibreglass duck" also works.
We could avoid this issue all together by simply building several giant fiberglass ducks.
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.
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. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English )
Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag.
It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.
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 ( https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix and https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes ).
It leads to some funny situations.
This one time I was at a company get-together and the CTO, whose son was just born, received some Peppa Pig merch.
I exclaimed (in English) "Peppa Pig is the shit!"
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.
Same here. Every few years I try to go through https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm to internalize more rules but it doesn't fully stick, and it's the only part of English that makes me self-conscious.
In programming terms 'a' is followed by a type name and 'the' is followed by a variable name.
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".
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.
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.
I cannot tell you how often I was listening to someone telling me a story about the 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.
While I am natively Slavic (Serbian) and my German is abysmal — you've never struggled with me I am sure, as I likely would not try a long story :) — I believe my English is sufficiently good that I run into similar issues with others speaking "improper" English.
But here I find it's mostly about trying to get into their linguistic framework when trying to understand them, and with my background of native Serbian being a very phonetic language, I can easily figure out when someone is coming from a more phonetic background: eg. or pronouncing "j" sound like "y" in "yay", more literal reading of other letters, etc. You obviously expect them to miss out on articles, tenses and even word ordering, so you work it all backwards. A bit like that trick for LLMs with broken, concise English.
So I really put it on me to re-process their language into what is the likely message they are trying to convey, and do not expect the precision of a native speaker.
It is hardest when someone's command of a language seems to be high (eg. they have great pronunciation and decent vocabulary), yet the basics are all wrong :)
And in some cases, it helps to know a bit of their native tongue, like with the Spanish and all of those "e-station" instead of "station", "e-static" instead of "static" (no, not "ecstatic" :), "e-sports" instead of "sports" etc.
You use the word "a" for interchangeable, fungible items and "the" for specific, unique, non-fungible items.
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.)
It is. Yours is acknowledging that your things are distinguishable and the other person might want one in particular.
GP's should be used when offering a specific one, like "the red one".
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.
“I bought the car” would indicate that you bought a specific one that is jointly understood.
In fact, if you had previously talked about a specific car you were thinking about buying, “I bought a car” would be a strong indicator that you bought a different 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.
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.
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.
a specific thing, or is it enough for it to be the thing?
sorry, just joking, this is not meant to be a genuine counterargument^^
I just want one of the new triple-cheese sandwiches please. And the salad of the day as a side.
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.
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 curious, what is your native tongue?
My guess: Czech. :)
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?
> since Slavic languages lack articles apart from Sorbian
As far as I know (and as confirmed by Wikipedia [1]), Sorbian does not have articles. Maybe you are thinking of Bulgarian, which does have articles (although the definite article attaches as a suffix to the noun, rather than being an independent word).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages
(Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate, but Hungarian most definitely has determinate and indeterminate articles.)
> Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate,
Is it up for debate? What is the argument against including Hungarian in Finno-Ugric? I mean, the "Ugric" part of Finno-Ugric is in reference to Hungarian.
Finnish doesn't.
This reminds me of “en” vs “ett” in Swedish. No rules - just gotta know
Der, die, das!
... den, des, dem. But those are derived from the three bass cases.
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!
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.
Tongue?
In this sense, it's a synonym for "language". Usually used as "mother tongue" (meaning, the language one grew up speaking).
> 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.
"a vs the" is quite easy IMO.
Most non-native however do not use "that" and "which" properly though. "Give me the floppy disk that is blue" and "Give the floppy disk, which is blue" are two different things.
My wife is Japanese and fluent in English but still almost always mixes up the and a. I think part of the problem is that it just barely sneaks under the radar of a mistake that is bad enough to confuse English first language speakers in everyday use. So theres no impetus to correct it
Nobody says that. "Give me the blue floppy disk"
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.
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).
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.
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.
[I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school
[I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced
"I know the English" - I know the English people
"I know the English language" - I know the English language (specifically)
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.
But in the third and forth sentences 'English' is both a collective noun and the name of a language which is just a coincidence.
> [I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school
> [I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced
That's not the distinction that the OP is making. If you say "I am at school", it means you are a student, you attend school. If you say "I am at THE school", it means you are physically at the school building, without specifying whether you are a student. Both of those options are different from saying "at a school." See also "prison", "work", "bed". Similar distinction (in UK English, not so much American English) with "in hospital" vs "in the hospital."
As was pointed out, "I go to the dentist every year" doesn't necessarily mean a particular dentist; it just means some dentist, but we use the definite article anyway, because I guess we consider all dentists interchangeable? We don't use definite articles even when we are referring to a specific thing in specific phrases, such as "I went to Florida by [the] car."
Then there's highly idiomatic use of articles with proper nouns. We say "Buckingham Palace" [no article] but "The Washington Monument" [definite article]. We talk about "The Rockies" [definite article] but "Mount Fuji" [no article]. "Germany" but "The United States." Sometimes we use the definite article when referring to to racial or ethnic groups, and sometimes we don't, and that choice can have complicated social implications ("The Blacks", anyone?).
In short, if a native English speaker tells you that article use is straightforward, then they simply have not considered all the cases.
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.
Consider other variations of this rule.
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.
In Irish, the word for father is "athair". To say "her father" it becomes "a hathair" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothesis_(linguistics)
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".
Whatever language you speak, it likely has some form of this rule.
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.
> It's avoiding two distinct vowel sounds in succession
That implies that English added a consonant there to avoid double vowels, but it's the other way around: it used to have "n" always, same as other Germanic languages, and then it was dropped to avoid two consonants in a row
He says he should have used an LLM to write his one-off code
I guess this is a common idea now
Yet since a lot of our coding is for one-offs then we are allowing LLMs to blunt our skills
Non-native speaker here. To me in spoken language both "unicorn" and "hour" have a combination of 2 vowels in the beginning. Let me transcribe them as "ee-oo" and "aa-oo" here.
Why is the aa-oo combination at the beginning of "hour" considered a vowel but the ee-oo in "uniform" is a consonant?
I didn't get the unicorn thing either, but it's explained better in the longer post (https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/). Unicorn is pronounced starting with a sound like 'you', which starts with a consonant.
To me, the ee-oo sound feels more like a Y in my mouth. However if I really draw out the word slowly it feels like ee-oo. But in practice it feels like Y.
I would transcribe the first sound of “unicorn” as “yoo“. It’s almost ee oo but the ee isn’t voiced—it starts right at the transition between those which is what the Y sound is.
There's also "the" vs "the". As in "the boy ate the apple". First 'the' ends with a schwa sound. Second 'the' ends with 'ee' sound.
Both schwa for me, native speaker who grew up in Scotland.
British English speaker: for me, the two 'e's' have the same sound.
The boy The apple.
Though I do say 'thee end'
My Brother says 'barth', I say 'bath'.
"anorack" is a specific spell checker to tell if we need "a" or "an". It uses espeak to decompose a word into phonemes.
So is it "a historic" or "an historic"? I've heard Stephen Colbert use "an historic" with a non-silent H.
For me only "an 'istoric" and "a historic" make sense, "an historic" always sounds like a learned, contrived thing to my ear.
Like something you're taught to say in a BBC newsroom or a private school.
Comedians often make jokes.
Is it "a LLM" or "an LLM"?
More generally, do you choose the article as if the first letter of the initialism were pronounced or as if the first word of the initialism were pronounced? Does it differ with acronyms? Does it differ between the UK and America?
an, because the spoken sound of "LLM" starts with a vowel, "el". So, pronunciation of first letter of initialism, when you're spelling the initialism. I think.
an LLM, an MP, an FBI agent, a CIA agent, a NASA engineer, an NSA mechanic, an 8 year old car, a 10 year old dog, et cetera – it's the sound of how you said those letters, always the sound.
I'm always curious why sometimes I pronounce the 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.
with "the actual" I imagine you're also putting in a kind of intrusive "y" sound so it flows better into the vowel
yep although I don't think it sounds too intrusive. it comes out as theeyactual while the alternative would the thuh.Actual with a sort of micro-accent on the A. I'm sure linguists have names for all these things, like when the movements of the tongue and mouth incidentally form phonemes!
I learned English as a second language and was taught it was thee before vowel sounds and thuh before consonants. Is it wrong?
It's similar to a/an, thuh is before a consonant and thee is before a vowel. And thee is also used for emphasis. But some people use a / thuh before a vowel. Do you have an example?
Hmm... I think it might be speed. I'll say "thuh apple" if I'm speaking slowly, and "thee apple" if I'm speaking quickly. Which is strange, because "thee apple" sounds more formal to me, yet it's what I default to only when speaking quickly.
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.
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.
My experience is that "thuh" is basically a lazy / informal pronunciation of that word.
But it's also by far the most common pronunciation. "Thee" would sound strangely hyper-formal, at least in my circles.
Edit: the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609) 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.
But I noticed that native speakers deviate from this at least in two cases:
1. Use thee to emphasize the following noun
2. When searching for the noun to say, they often get it wrong because they say something like "uh, thee, thee, thee, uh, book" and never sweat it.
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
Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?
“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass
“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.
Hmm... I think an /u/ ("oo") triggers "thuh" for me, as in "the ubermensch." But that might just be my idiolect.
I realized long after the edit window expired that autocorrect changed it to “thus”.
The one that gets me is when people use "a" with initialisms, e.g. "She drives a RV," just sounds off to me. she can do her thing but I drive an RV.
That said, I think the former might be more common these days, so arguably the rules might just differ between written an spoken English in some dialects.
I once wrote “an FAQ” and someone corrected me that it should be “a FAQ”. Turns out she pronounced it “fak” and not “ef ay cue”
As a 'fak', pronounce, eff ay queue' is far too long.
But I bet she drives a Recreational Vehicle instead of an Recreational Vehicle.
When people get this wrong, ask them to spell it out phonetically. We sometimes forget that our language is more based on sound than sight.
An arrvee.
An actual use case for Jev?
Every language has its own quirks. In Chinese, you don't have this a/an difficulty, but the grammatical tenses are so fluid that a lot of contextual cues are needed to make sense whether "I went" [zoule 走了] means I really went in the past, or I am going now (ignoring the semantic diff as well, since zou also means to pass away).
A more natural way to see it is that Chinese does not really have tenses in the first place.
Actually, it does, it's just not so fixed about them.
For instance: "I have gone", "I had gone" are said the same way, but there is a slight difference when you say "I have been going" and there is really no way to say "I had been going" unless contextual tokens are added onto.
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.
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.
One fun thing is that some words can reasonably go either way: "a hotel" vs "an hotel" or "a SQL query" vs "an SQL query".
For me, only “a hotel” and “an SQL query” sound correct here
(Edit: I just realised this might be a dialect thing. I say “ess cue ell” and not “sequel”, and “hoe tell” rather than “otel”. Australian accent)
Luckily zed and zee won't flip the article.
a ho.tel
an oh.tel or o.tel (is it still spoken somewhere like this?)
The confusion arrives for words like "herb" depending upon whether the place uses F or C for temperature ;-)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
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.
In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
english is my second language, but I learned it early enough that I didn't have to study the rules (and it more or less replaced my mother tongue).
Years later a friend who was learning english asked me the difference between "a" and "an" and I realised I had no idea. I know when to use each, but not the rule governing why.
Fascinating how different the experience learning a language can be when do you explicitly, through learning the structure and rules, versus via immersion where you know what's right, but perhaps not why.
> but not the rule governing why.
Be glad you didn’t have to learn German, our grammatical gender only has more exceptions than rules.
For anyone interested in getting "more 9s" from the heuristics and then building something useful with it, come join us at https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z32314
It really grinds my gears when someone says “an year”.
You just need to lend an ear.
Who says this? I haven’t heard it once in my life
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.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
Happily sourced in Wikipedia so I don't have to figure out which episode I learned that from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder <- see below the table in Taxonomy.
And cherries were ceries from French, leading to the singular form cherry. Lots of neat little things like this.
And peas was both singular and plural like fish.
"I ate a single peas" "I ate many peas"
People thought it was a mistake and generated "pea" for a new singular.
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?
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"
These are typical errors made by the native speakers. Most (every?) language has rules, which are more difficult for a native speaker to follow vs. a well-spoken foreigner.
Other examples in English are:
- who vs whom
- then vs than
- ask vs acks
Ask vs acks is just a regional pronunciation variant, nothing inherently wrong with it. I have noticed that a lot of people from backgrounds with enforced language uniformity (french and Russian speakers for example) have trouble with the idea though.
Less vs fewer.
Very few people say "acks" instead of "ask". It's not a common error at all. I would say "who"/"whom" is the only truly common one you listed, though screwing up "than"/"then" is at least common enough that one runs into it with some regularity.
i think this post with more details would be a better link: https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/. The graph of exceptional cases is particularly interesting.
(Besides, it clarifies the colour scheme — the red vs black went totally unnoticed to my colourblind eye.)
Thanks, I was wondering about the exceptions!
I can tell you did not use AN llm to write this post. Thanks.
> for some words, we use an. For example, an apple.
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.
What matters is the sound though, not the character - so it’s not as trivial to algorithmize. Eg. A hammock, an hour.
This is covered exactly in the post right under that sentence. Why just restate it?
Any verdict for "historic"?
Both occur, but "a historic" is standard choice in modern English.
Since most speakers pronounce the h, it takes "a" not "an".
Contrast to "an hour", where the h is silent.
And for 'herb' it depends on which dialect of English you speak.
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: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historic%2Ca...
It depends on if you're speaking British or American English.
The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.
> The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.
"The British" aren't monolithic and neither are our approaches to this.
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).
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.
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.
ETA: clarification in reply to reply
My point is that it's based on pronunciation. I didn't mean to offend you.
No offence taken — I just mean to clarify that the proportion of British speakers who do this an-then-soft-H thing is actually pretty small.
Having said that, there are two constituencies that do it, I guess:
- Those who do it out of upper class background or affectation: using the French soft H that survives in the American pronunciation of 'herbs' is a class signifier.
- And those who do it out of broader dropped-H slackness; it's not out of the question that someone would say "it's an 'istoric day" run together, in a variety of regional and rural accents.
So if you meant the latter, then, yes! Probably more people do it as a result of dropping H more generally than out of upper class identification.
But in the middle of those two, most of us, I think, use the hard H, and certainly "BBC English" has moved in that direction.
The majority of British accents would pronounce the 'h'.
but not, apparently, the haitch
I have seen an American book, published in the 1960s, whose title included "An Historical Survey".
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.
"A his-toric day"
"An his-toric day"
Both seem to work correctly with American pronunciation.
Journalists and films seem to use "an historic" with an American accent, which breaks the rule but still feels correct.
For most words the indefinite article is clear. This one feels weird.
> This one seems to defy the rule.
No it doesn't. If I pronounce the "h", then using "an" sounds weird. If I don't, then "a" sounds weird.
> Journalists and films seem to use "an historic" with an American accent
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:
> Rachel Maddow "an historic day"
For example:
- https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47356492
- https://www.ms.now/transcript/2013-11-21-msna738766
It's one of those things American pseudo intellectuals do because they think it's more correct and want to sound superior. Maybe they heard a professor say it that way or read it in a book. Anything but actually process why the a/an distinction exists.
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.
"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.
That’s confusing because I was taught whether something is vowel or consonant is the spoken, not written, truth.
"a whole nother" is one of my favorite linguistic quirks.
"an apron" used to be "a napron"
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.
Now, if they used the British-style "an 'istoric event", that's fine. In American we don't pronounce the "h" in "herb", so someone here saying "an herb garden" would follow the rule correctly and sound normal.
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 exactly what rich people would wear.
thanks for the confession, you are simply guilty of ignorance. I on the other hand am guilty of thinking the English and the French both sound pretentious about pretty much everything: they are both always judging people.
here you go, some straight facts:
https://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-historic-vs-an-historic/
including "The Google Ngram Viewer provides an interesting look at the progress of “an historic” vs “a historic.” In 1800, “a historic” barely shows. It begins its rise in the 1820s. In 1869, “a historic” is neck and neck with “an historic.” The two travel along fairly close together until the First World War when “an historic” pulls ahead and dominates until 1938. After that, “a historic” becomes the clear winner, although “an historic” and “an historical” remain in use. Here are two recent examples of the use of “an historical” in the context of educated English..."
From your link:
> Style guides like The Chicago Manual of Style, The AP Stylebook, and The Penguin Writer’s Manual regard the following as correct in modern usage: “a historical event” “a historic event.”
If you don’t pronounce the h, “an” is the clear winner. Now that most people do in America, “a” is the obviously correct spelling.
I feel the same way about "an homage". The H is normally pronounced on "homage" - for example, you would not say "pay homage to" with the faux-French pronunciation. So you therefore would say "a homage". It sounds so pretentious when people pronounce it the other way.
Words are often pronounced differently in English depending on whether they are being used in a noun or verb context.
e.g. attribute, increase, conduct
I think that's one regional. It'd be super weird to pronounce the h in homage in most of Canada ime.
"if words starts with hones" fails for "hones" itself; I suspect that should have been "honest" in the code.
This is one of the examples where English is perfectly consistent.
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".
But yeah, maybe it is a rare exception, because "an n-gram" is probably standard.
I'm perfectly fine with applying the rule to all other proper names? E.g. "a Microsoft employee" or "an HSBC product".
The writeup lost me there, when it jumps to hard-codes lists using this example as justification. AI slop?
> The actual rule is not whether the written word starts with a vowel letter, but whether the spoken word starts with a vowel sound.
The only exemption I know about is emphasis by pause, it allows to use "a" before a vowel sound in some exceptional cases.
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.
This is described on the site, I see now. But it jumps to data science and statistics before even stating the problem accurately?
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.
Some people pronounce nvidia as nuhvidia others as envidia so when the writer puts "a" or "an" before it they're revealing how they pronounce it
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.
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.
An historic just sounds pretentious, sorry :p
You don’t have to apologize, I don’t like it either.
A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.
(Genderswappedstories.com)
And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.
Him always swaps to her
Eg it was him - it was her
But his can swap to her or hers
It is his -> it is hers
It is his thing -> it is her thing.
And her can also swap to him or his
It was her -> it was him
It was her thing -> it was his thing
And hers always swaps to his.
So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!
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!
Can anyone explain why this happens?
> Can anyone explain why this happens?
Historically speaking, it seems to have been due to two independent coincidences:
• The falling together of object pronoun her and possessive her seems to date back to Old English, where the genitive and dative cases were both hire. 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.
• 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 her became hers, but it had no effect on his, since that already ended with an ⟨s⟩.
Thus we end up with the paradigm of:
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).
"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).
"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).
"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.
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.
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).
[Why is this getting voted down? Bizarre.]
Some YouTubers always say a like the letter a (e.g. the vowel in "day")
I find it pretty annoying. A different YouTuber had a good video about it though https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJLyFAzYes&ra=m
a.k.a. "hard attack". There's a nice video on the subject by linguist Geoff Lindsey: https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ
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.
No
Eh? I hear both of these on a regular basis. It is a phenomenon.
It might be regional? I haven't noticed it in the northeastern US, or in the multinational company I work at, where I talk regularly with people from at least 10 countries.
I've spent some time thinking about this before, and it provides a clue about the writers accent. For example:
"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.
GP is talking about the name of the letter H like when you're saying the ABCs. How do you pronounce it?
"I think it's mostly Irish with the former."
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.
But you can hear "an" used in phrases like "an hotel" or "an historic building", where the "h" is usually pronounced.
Most Americans don't pronounce the "h" in "herb" or "herbal" afaict. We do usually pronounce it in people's names though, like "Herb".
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