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."
The problem is that you are mixing two different constructs, if you are refering to the whole thing you have to say un/una, if you are describing a property of something you don't use it.
Es un perro, es macho. (It's a dog, is male)
If you are talking about doctor being a property of someone,like his profession, you say "es médico" but if you are refering to the doctor as an entity and not a property of someone you have to use "a":
Es un médico muy famoso (He is a very famous doctor). "Es médico muy famoso" again makes no sense.
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.)
I'm not sure why, but sentence feels forced and unnatural, and as a result a bit unconvincing. My intuition is to insert an "and" at the end of those three options and then it feels like you can't drop the "a", i.e. "married, tall, and a doctor in medicine". I mean, maybe you can but the sentence feels odd to me.
And the weird part is that you can put those three properties in any order, and you would not place an "a" in front of the other two.
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.
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?
And actually, it is not so common to write the actual personal pronouns in Spanish, as they become more or less clear seeing the verb ending, due to conjugation of the verb. So one would probably say "Es médico.", when in context.
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.
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.
And there we get to the word both or all, where interestingly Mandarin has an (over)insistence on using it, even in places, where it seems unnecessary.
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.
To keep it simple, you use an when the first letter of the next word sounds like a vowel when pronounced (vowel sound) and appplies to ancronyms too. Otherwise you use a.
Yes, I'm well aware. I'm responding to the code in the OP's article (you need to click through the link at the bottom of the HN submission--I have no idea why the OP blog has two separate pages for this).
The MRI example is perfect, but I feel like the yogurt one is a bad example given the "and sometimes Y" (is a vowel) thing, or do we just ignore that for a vs an?
Like in this context, do we always treat Y when pronounced like "Yes" or "Yogurt" as a consonant?
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.
It is common for someone to say, for instance, "I need to go to the store" even if they don't have any particular store in mind.
A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I need to go to a store", but in my judgment as a native speaker, the version with "the" is more idiomatic, and the version with "a" sounds stilted.
"I go to the dentist every year" implies that you have a usual dentist or some sort of stable routine or plan vs "I go on a trip every year" which implies the journey is yet to be selected/defined from a multitude of options.
So I feel the rule isn't always taken literally, but the vs a is selected based on whether something is up for consideration/substitution rather than something that's well defined and specified.
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.
"Our town has the castle". Is reasonable for meaning that it has the best/oldest/most historical/largest one. Or in general that the specific castle that has something which separates it from the rest.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
I read in a book some years ago how some Sorbian speakers had started to use articles under the influence of German, but I've no idea how widespread it was, and I think it's been discouraged during language revival.
When Wikipedia says "Sorbian uses no articles", it is not telling the full story.
I couldn't find much on this online when I searched for it. But did find at least one respectable reference, which agrees with what I remember:
Abstract:
"Slavonic languages in general do not use articles to indicate (in)definiteness. The development of an article in some of them is the result of language contact. In the case of Sorbian the influence of German led to the use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the numeral ‘one’ to indicate definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively. Originally the German system was copied almost without changes, but eventually specific rules developed, subject to phonotactic constraints and restricting the use of the article mainly to intratextual and pragmatic definiteness. The use of the article depended on the kind of text and language (spoken language, Bible translation and original texts, translations from German). Grammatical purism managed to eliminate the use of the article in today’s written variants as well as in most official uses of spoken Sorbian almost completely. In colloquial language and in the dialects, however, the article is very much alive but its use differs considerably from German. There are also differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, the latter being closer to German usage."
Wikipedia tends to be better on linguistics than some other areas, but best not to become over-reliant on it. This is just one reminder that it does not cover many things.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
In the 16th century, being "on the money" meant an arrow or a dart being on (or near) a specific physical coin (i.e. the money), like in a tossing or shooting bar-bet.
Being on merely a money (or some money) would likely not be as impressive in said circumstances, and so whilst being grammatically possible in English, it shouldn't seem so likely the sort of thing anyone would ever have had to say.
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.
Both of these are common in the US. It doesn't seem like there's any strong regional connection.
Judging from a search, "play the piano" is about 5 times as common as "play piano", but there are also many sources which uses both versions in close proximity, apparently interchangeably.
With context these can mean different things. You might also play a piano, or hire either a player piano, or a piano player.
If you are answering which instrument you play, it's the former, but if we are talking the profession it's the latter, because you don't say then that you play a piano.
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
As a non-native now living in UK I noticed this R sound in some accents. Someone said 'Java (r)Options' which when I asked they didn't even realise they were adding it. Both this R and N in an seem to be used break the continuity of vowels between words.
It’s actually something that is changing in English right now. In some languages like German all word-initial vowel sounds are pronounced with a glottal stop at the start (a so-called “hard attack”) but English generally doesn’t (or didn’t) do that, resulting in “thee apple”. Younger speakers are starting to use hard attack before word-initial vowel sounds so the “thee” variant isn’t present for them.
I’m not sure if this also affects “a” vs “an” (i.e. I don’t know if younger people are starting to say e.g. “a apple”) because that obviously makes an orthographical difference so it might be more persistent. Although I suppose they coud say both “an” and begin the next word with a glottal stop.
Keep an ear out if you’re listening to a younger native English speaker and you might be able to hear it.
Yeah, these are different for me as a southern Englishman. Languages generally try to avoid glottal stops. French has a lovely system called liaison where a consonant sound will appear to separate two consecutive vowels. In English we like diphthongs so I guess we use this similarly to liaison. Some accents just use glottal stops, though, nay bother.
Also native British. I would say "thee apple" would be by far the more common pronunciation in op's example but I probably wouldn't blink if someone said "thuh apple".
English is so much easier than, let's say, Greek, Russian, or French (at least these I know firsthand). Even Bulgarian, my native language, which is simpler than Russian, is much harder than English, with a lot more things to memorize. Two things in English take time: punctuation and vocabulary (with all the nuances of words). Everything else is easy-peasy!
> [LLM It doesn’t need to be clean or maintainable. It only needs to be correct
But correctness is precisely the issue with LLMs?
But also
> I would’ve spent more time on the trie simplification algorithm and less time on parsing cmudict and re-learning d3.js.]
You could've spent nothing on D3 because the result is bad/poorly readable - much worse than a simple table alphabetically-aligned interception table, which I could use to answer curious questions such as "how can I compare "A" and "O" in terms of exceptions? or "which letter has the most exceptions"?")
(and the blue color is out of place, vowel/consonant split should visually be the same "category", not black/colord. Red for exceptions is fine)
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 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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
If pay attention to some americans speaking, you'll notice that they find it hard when and where to use 'an' vs. 'a'. You'll hear things like 'a example', 'a understanding' etc. English is hard (for some).
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.
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.
Yes, this is an exception to the rule in British English, although possibly old-fashioned and becoming obsolete. Some British people put "an" before any word starting with "h" and longer than three syllables.
EDIT
I'm wrong here - I don't think anyone ever says "an Halloween celebration" for example. But I was sure there were other "h" counterexamples than historic.
For english people, as in actual english not from the UK, its a historic, unless its for emphasis.
There is/are some religious overtones, that are infused into this. Catholics used to (or still do) say "hay-tch" for h, where as non-Catholic would say "ay-tch". However that distinction is not so acute in england(unless you're in/near liverpool), but it might be in scotland and its certainly there in NI
People speaking dialects that don't pronounce the "h" in "history". Which used to be a lot more common when this rule was written down. I've heard several English dialects that pronounce "historian" like "istorian", and who would say "a istorian"?
English is full of obscure rules that were written down ages ago, often because one particular guy wrote down his personal preference and others accepted it as fact ("less" vs "fewer", for instance).
English speakers still can't agree whether the h in "herb" is pronounced or not. I don't see why anyone would be surprised that other words beginning with h are also subject to debate.
"a history lesson" and "an historic event" have different stress in the history area (or at least they can have, depending on the phrase context), and I think that explains it.
Saying "a historic event" requires you to pause and stress the start of historic (a + glottal stop + "his" + ...). It's a natural phrasing pattern to have the initial part of historic unstressed, and then the h is effectively dropped even if you're not speaking an h-dropping dialect; this way "an historic event" follows as correct.
We simplify a lot of sounds in unstressed parts of words, but because we know and "see" the spelling, our brains can keep the illusion of the whole word going for us.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I have heard it on YouTube videos and elsewhere. "A" plus a y sound, or glottal stop. People talking about "ay answer" or "a yanswer" rather than "an answer". This has not made it into the written language yet, although some people write "a answer" rather than "an answer" etc.
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.
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."
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