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English: A vs. An
- chistev 6d agoA honest or an honest?
- habanany 6d ago[dead]
- dataflow 6d agoAny verdict for "historic"?
- beaned 6d agoIt depends on if you're speaking British or American English. The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.
- echelon 6d agoI 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.
- beaned 6d agoThey 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.
- kelnos 6d ago> 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.
- Rendello 6d agoI 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.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47356492 - https://www.ms.now/transcript/2013-11-21-msna738766 https://www.ms.now/transcript/2013-11-21-msna738766
- beaned 6d agoIt'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.
- echelon 6d agoSportscasters do it too. It's all over media. You hear it in movies. I'm pretty sure "an historic" is the norm in American media, not the other way around.
- dofm 6d ago> 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
- beaned 6d agoMy point is that it's based on pronunciation. I didn't mean to offend you.
- dofm 6d agoNo 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.
- Planktonne 6d agoThe majority of British accents would pronounce the 'h'.
- fsckboy 6d agobut not, apparently, the haitch
- AnimalMuppet 6d agoI 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.
- gottheUIblues 6d agoNo they don't - eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Britain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Britain_(TV_serie...
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 6d agoBoth 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.
- tmtvl 6d agoAnd for 'herb' it depends on which dialect of English you speak.
- layer8 6d agoBoth 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%2Can+historic&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historic%2Ca...
- Narishma 6d agoDepends on whether or not you pronounce the H.
- drnick1 6d agoAn would always be wrong here, in the U.S. at least.
- kichimi 6d agoI'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'.
- post-it 6d agoA/an herb, for example.
- mc32 6d ago/heitsh/ vs /eitsh/. I think it's mostly Irish with the former.
- kelnos 6d agoAnd Australian, I believe.
- ajxs 6d agoI'm Australian, and I say 'A Hotel', and 'A Herb'. Until very recently, I'd never heard anyone ever say it differently.
- nephihaha 6d ago"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.
- abraxas 6d agoWhat 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.
- CoastalCoder 6d agoJust curious, what is your native tongue?
- Laurel1234 6d ago[dead]
- nephihaha 6d agoMy 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?
- fonheponho 6d ago(Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate, but Hungarian most definitely has determinate and indeterminate articles.)
- machomaster 6d agoFinnish doesn't.
- hackyhacky 6d ago> 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.
- throwawayk7h 6d agoI'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?
- devindotcom 6d agoI 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.
- rizonio 6d agowith "the actual" I imagine you're also putting in a kind of intrusive "y" sound so it flows better into the vowel
- devindotcom 6d agoyep 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!
- __david__ 5d agoI do too, but with an exception—if I’m going to emphasize the word “actual” I’ll say “thuh ACTual” but with a full stop after the “the” so that I can really chew on that first syllable for the emphasis.
- CoastalCoder 6d agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609) also rings true to me.
- mauvehaus 6d agoFun 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/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder <- see below the table in Taxonomy.
- adzm 6d agoAnd cherries were ceries from French, leading to the singular form cherry. Lots of neat little things like this.
- Tagbert 6d agoAnd 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.
- hrnnnnnn 6d agoSwedish does a similar thing where it takes the plural of an English word as the singular Swedish loanword. Kex = biscuit, from "cakes" Keps = hat, from "caps"
- Scharkenberg 6d agoGerman does it too: ein Keks = a cookie
- amitp 6d agoThat is my favorite podcast of all time!
- zem 6d ago"if words starts with hones" fails for "hones" itself; I suspect that should have been "honest" in the code.
- nephihaha 6d agoI 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.]
- bethekidyouwant 6d agoNo
- nephihaha 6d agoEh? I hear both of these on a regular basis. It is a phenomenon.
- antonvs 6d agoIt 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.
- nephihaha 6d agoI 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.
- isityettime 6d agoI'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.
- YoshiRulz 6d agoa.k.a. "hard attack". There's a nice video on the subject by linguist Geoff Lindsey: https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ
- prometheus1992 6d agoI can tell you did not use AN llm to write this post. Thanks.
- mococa 6d agoAs a non speaker, I really hate this rule
- hbn 6d agoA 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."
- asveikau 6d agoThe 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.
- rawling 6d ago> 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.
- asveikau 6d agoI 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.
- Joker_vD 6d ago
- moritzwarhier 6d agoThis 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.
- SilasX 6d agoI 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.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- subarctic 6d agoAn historic just sounds pretentious, sorry :p
- mkatx 6d agoI 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"
- machomaster 6d agoThese 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
- tmtvl 6d agoLess vs fewer.
- bigstrat2003 6d agoVery 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.
- ViscountPenguin 6d agoAsk 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.
- olsondv 6d agoWhich region? I’d say it’s more tied to African American vernacular.
- machomaster 6d ago
- dearjames 6d agoThis 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?
- schoen 6d agoIt could be a gimmick to grab attention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res 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.
- loloquwowndueo 6d ago> 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.
- blharr 6d agoThis is covered exactly in the post right under that sentence. Why just restate it?
- bradrn 6d agoi think this post with more details would be a better link: https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/ 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.)
- matheusmoreira 6d agoThanks, I was wondering about the exceptions!
- pvillano 6d ago"a whole nother" is one of my favorite linguistic quirks.
- fsckboy 6d ago"an apron" used to be "a napron"
- shagie 6d agoIt'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) 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.
- usrnm 6d ago> 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
- tomjakubowski 6d agoSpanish does something similar with feminine nouns which start with an "a" sound, like agua. las aguas, el agua. las aguas claras, el agua clara. but then for este/esta, it's esta agua and not este agua https://www.rae.es/espanol-al-dia/el-agua-esta-agua-mucha-agua-0 https://www.rae.es/espanol-al-dia/el-agua-esta-agua-mucha-ag...
- kstrauser 6d agoConfession: 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.
- bigstrat2003 6d agoI 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.
- fsckboy 6d agothanks 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/ 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..."
- jonplackett 6d agoA 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?
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- pdonis 6d agoHoldovers 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.
- jonplackett 6d ago
- YoshiRulz 6d agoFor 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 https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z32314
- Rendello 6d agoStarting 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.
- pyuser583 6d agoThat’s confusing because I was taught whether something is vowel or consonant is the spoken, not written, truth.
- deleted 6d ago[deleted]
- xelxebar 6d agoThe 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.
- joquarky 6d agoWhen 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.
- litoE 6d agoBut I bet she drives a Recreational Vehicle instead of an Recreational Vehicle.
- namenotrequired 6d agoI 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”
- Ylpertnodi 6d agoAs a 'fak', pronounce, eff ay queue' is far too long.
- olsondv 6d agoHaven’t seen much discussion of “a” changing between “uh” and “ay”. “Uh RV” is hard to say. “Ay RV” is not so bad. I still prefer “an RV” as well.
- vbernat 6d ago"anorack" is a specific spell checker to tell if we need "a" or "an". It uses espeak to decompose a word into phonemes.
- jan_m_savage 6d agoEvery 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).
- samus 6d agoA more natural way to see it is that Chinese does not really have tenses in the first place.
- jan_m_savage 6d agoActually, 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.
- MathMonkeyMan 6d agoIs 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?
- mholt 6d agoan, 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.
- crossroadsguy 6d agoan 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.
- MathMonkeyMan 6d agoAlso [a history vs. an history][1]. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_vs_a_history/ https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_...
- at1as 6d agoenglish 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.
- Semaphor 6d ago> but not the rule governing why. Be glad you didn’t have to learn German, our grammatical gender only has more exceptions than rules.
- steve_taylor 6d agoIt really grinds my gears when someone says “an year”.
- crossroadsguy 6d agoYou just need to lend an ear.
- namenotrequired 6d agoWho says this? I haven’t heard it once in my life
- tikhonj 6d agoOne fun thing is that some words can reasonably go either way: "a hotel" vs "an hotel" or "a SQL query" vs "an SQL query".
- wizzledonker 6d agoFor 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)
- crossroadsguy 6d agoLuckily zed and zee won't flip the article.
- crossroadsguy 6d agoa 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 ;-)
- outlore 6d agoAn actual use case for Jev?
- hiccuphippo 6d agoSo is it "a historic" or "an historic"? I've heard Stephen Colbert use "an historic" with a non-silent H.
- Dwedit 6d agoComedians often make jokes.
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- n4r9 6d agoYes, 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.
- n4r9 5d agoI asked Claude and it showed me various examples of other words that may well be preceded with "an", such as heroic, habitual, and hereditary. It's to do with how strongly the "h" is pronounced.
- IshKebab 6d agoThis is a common overcorrection. It's 100% "a historic" if you're pronouncing the "h" (which everyone does). People who say "an historic" are wrong - they're imagining there's some exception that there isn't. You can easily tell they're wrong because who says "an history lesson"?
- kzrdude 6d ago"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.
- tarkin2 6d agoHe 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
- Dwedit 6d agoThere'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.
- Ylpertnodi 6d agoBritish 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'.
- IshKebab 6d agoAlso 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".
- hrnnnnnn 6d agoBoth schwa for me, native speaker who grew up in Scotland.
- kentosi 6d agoAustralian native speaker here. Only the first "the" is a schwa for me. Must be tied to how we both pronounce the first "a" in apple differently.
- IanCal 6d agoBoth schwa for me unless I was trying to draw particular attention to the apple and denote it was rather significant.
- globular-toast 6d agoYeah, 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.
- theanonymousone 6d agoThe 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.
- jayd16 6d agoAs a patron of the 405, there is no consensus.
- geocar 6d agoTry 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.
- m12k 6d agoRight on the money!
- geocar 6d agoIn 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.
- rom1v 6d ago"I play the piano" or "I play piano"?
- ad133 6d agoWeirdly, 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.
- mh-cx 6d agoNon-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?
- dbalatero 6d agoTo 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.
- ryankrage77 6d agoI 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/ https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/). Unicorn is pronounced starting with a sound like 'you', which starts with a consonant.
- __david__ 6d agoI 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.
- IanCal 6d agoUniform starts with a y sound and hour has a w sound after the first a - aw ur.
- nivertech 6d ago“a San Francisco startup” /ə ˌsæn frənˈsɪskoʊ ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/ vs “an SF startup” /ən ˌɛsˈɛf ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/ i.e. you have to mentally pronounce the phrase before choosing which form of the indefinite article to write
- rererereferred 6d agoWhich sucks when I'm writing about SQL because it works both ways: "An es-cue-el query" "A sequel query"
- eviks 6d agoInteresting analysis > [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)
- penguin_booze 6d agoIf 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).
- bugufu8f83 6d ago> if word.startswith("ub"): return False An uber-rich man riding in an Uber installed an Ubuntu package. I'm actually a bit surprised by this rule. Is this line there entirely due to the word "ubiquitous"? I think it is.
- ExoticPearTree 6d agoTo 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.
- xattt 6d ago“An MRI report“ vs “a yogurt container”.
- 0manrho 6d agoThe 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?
- ExoticPearTree 6d agoBecause “an youghurt container” sounds wrong. English has this thing where you know you wrote or pronounced something correct if it sounds right.
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- smusamashah 6d agoThe A becomes An for the same reason as the linking R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R 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.
- nikolay 6d agoEnglish 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!
- troupo 6d agoPunctuation is easy in English. Especially compared to Russian. Spelling is horrendous, and it takes a lot of time to memorize it and internalize it. And even then: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/chaos.html https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...
- nikolay 5d agoTo me, English punctuation seems chaotic compared to Bulgarian, which could be hard but logical. English spelling is better than, let's say, Greek or French. As a developer, I'm surprised people write either "Hello world!" or "Hello, world!" In Bulgarian, as in Russian, the addressee is always set off by commas.
- stevekemp 6d agoListening to a Finnish children learn English there are some cases where they struggle and perhaps some of it is vocabulary, "fall" vs "fell", "freeze" vs "froze" (i.e. past tenses). But there are lot more gotchas and I think pronounciation is one of the biggest gotchas. Finnish is a bad starting point as the language has very regular pronounciation, but hearing a child read new text it's obvious how difficent pronounciation is to learn for even everyday, commonly-used words.
- revexos 6d agoimpressed and curious
- puchatek 6d agoGrammar Nazi here. The first sound in unicorn is a semivowel, not a vowel. You're welcome!
- gigatexal 6d agoI’m glad this was posted. I’ve always wondered about this but was either too lazy or too afraid to look it up.
- deliciousturkey 6d agoAs a native speaker of a language without articles, I find the English article system by far the most intuitive and easiest to learn of all the languages I have studied. Most other Indo-European languages have articles that you simply need to memorize, as there is no way to derive them from the word itself. Which I never manage to do.
- nlitened 6d agoYou probably mean word genders? So you probably say it's sometimes difficult to derive the gender of a noun, hence the correct article
- andoando 6d agoGenders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed. I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
- smgpie 6d agoNevertheless, embedding gender into the language grammar enables many very elegant expressions of phrases as seem in many Latin and Greek poets.
- eru 6d ago> Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed. Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
- andsoitis 6d agoHow does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?
- sajithdilshan 6d agoI would take a/an any day over ein/einen/einem/einer/eines in German
- rochak 6d agoThat sounds complex as hell
- tomjakubowski 6d agoOn the other hand it's a nice thing that "kein" and "nein" are different words.
- sajithdilshan 6d agoDon’t forget keinen/keiner/keinem/keines as well
- gwuah 6d agodutch also has 3 articles: de/het(definite) & een(indefinite); and there is an entire chain of rules that largely(99%) do nothing for semantics besides track that arbitrary distinction. for example: there are 2 ways of saying [this](deze,dit) and 2 ways of saying [that](die, dat). not sure how gender-classes entered languages but they can be a pain!
- antfarm 6d agoFunny how that short article has a sentence where an article that should be there is omitted. "The word <unicorn> starts with vowel letter..." When I see this, I always assume the author to be Russian.
- ronjakoi 6d agoThere are tons of languages that don't use indefinite articles. Russian is a big one, sure.
- jwally 6d agoWhat about "An honorable man" spoken with an American accent? British accent? Dialects and syntax are weirdly fascinating .
- docheinestages 6d agoThis is exactly what language models are good at. It's not a problem that could be solved purely deterministically, because it requires knowledge of the actual pronunciation in that particular language or dialect. There can be so many exceptions to the rule, so it's just easier to train a small language model on a sufficiently large dataset.
- emn13 6d agoSure, but note that a tiny LLM is many order of magnitudes larger than algorithms like this. It might well work better, but you're probably paying for very, very marginal improvements with a solution that's thousands of times larger and slower, unless you're you're being really creative and using a fairly non-LLM network of perceptrons or other ML technique. But it sounds like a fun challenge; if you or anybody feels like exploring that, I bet it'd get quite a few curious clicks here!
- docheinestages 6d agoIt really depends on the use case, which the author didn't hint to (sure, they say procedurally generating text, but exactly how and for what reason?). But whatever it is, I assume it needs to be accurate to some degree, and having a deterministic ruleset is just too subjective and superficial to cover all cases. It doesn't need to be a full-fledged LLM either. What I mean is that a probabilistic machine learning model trained on a sufficiently large dataset is probably a better choice here. Small language models are pretty efficient nowadays, even for on-device use cases with constrained resources.
- seydar 6d agoFor those looking for a satirical scientific treatise of "a" vs "an": https://specgram.com/PsQ.XVI.4/06.pulju.indefinite.html https://specgram.com/PsQ.XVI.4/06.pulju.indefinite.html
- olexsmir 6d agoAs a native speaker of a language without articles, I understand how articles work, I know(or at least knew at some point) the grammar, but I still omit them unintentionally. And the most frustrating part is that I use English every single day, probably even more than my native language.
- anArbitraryOne 6d agoGood, but having a plot subtitle "Tree style visualization of the first two letters of a word Visualization showing whether the first two letters of a word are enough to determine whether it should have “a” or “an”" isn't very informative. Tell me how to read it
- quuxplusone 5d agoPerhaps relevant to this audience: NetHack has a routine specifically for this. https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/src/objnam.c#L2136-L2171 https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/src/objn... I think I agree with the comment in NH5 that some of the new cases "probably shouldn't be handled here", and think maybe NH3.4.3's simpler version should've been fine for NetHack's purposes: https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack-3.4.3/blob/master/src/objnam.c#L920-L941 https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack-3.4.3/blob/master...
- faaager 5d agoA quirky story about A vs. An. When I was in third grade we started studying english (I'm Swedish). One day our teacher was aiming to teach us when to use a vs. an. I came home and showed my mother what I had done during the day, and I had copied the drawing the teacher had done on the blackboard that basically stated that "A" was used for singular and "An" for Plural. Example given was: A foot, An foots. End of story
- dtm9876541234 5d agoOf course regional variations are a thing here too - for example in Welsh accents, it often is "An unicorn" (pronounced like "an iwnicorn")