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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
“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.
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.
Absent any context, “the nice evening” sounds strange because no one really expects there to be only one nice evening.
However it can makes sense if the surrounding context supports the idea of only one nice evening.
Grammar rules are generally about the surrounding context which allow us to leave out superfluous or repeated information and still be understood. Things sound strange when that missing information can’t be deduced from context.
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.
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.
The reason you say "our house has a pool" is not that you're not referring to a specific pool. It's that the pool you're referring to is not already present in the conversational context, and it needs to be introduced. A(n) performs that introduction.
If you refer to that same pool without introducing it, it will still be marked for definiteness - compare my pool, my house's pool, or the pool at my house. But your example sentence doesn't work that way.
(Note that the three phrases I listed are all bare noun phrases that can't stand as sentences. Note also that if you used one of those phrases when your listener wasn't already aware that you had a pool, they might feel that you "moved too fast" in the conversation, assuming that they knew about your pool when they didn't.)
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?").
I appreciate your good faith, the suggestions, and your elaboration on them.
For context, extensive coding over two decades has ingrained in me the habit of explicitly disambiguating my statements of machine-executable logic expressed in natural language from personal guesswork and opinions.
I should integrate your suggestion and try not to explicitly qualify my guesswork. Using passively implied qualifiers in the structure of my opinion pieces would be a step in the right direction.
"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.
Because you are referring to a specific one of each, even if a listener doesn’t necessarily know which specific one, they know that you know.
In the case of your example the listener assumes you mean whichever specific dentist you are currently seeing. That fact that you may choose one randomly each time is an exception.
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!
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" 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!"
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
Here I have no idea why in the last sentence you wrote "all the cases" even though cases is already plural. This is not covered by any of the rules people have been posting in this thread. I'm the GP who started the article usage discussion here.
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.
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.
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.
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
Even as a native, I didn't know the difference until I looked it up right now, and I'm almost 50.
Short form, for those who wonder:
"That" is used for things that are important, and "which" is used for things that aren't. In the first sentence, they want the blue floppy disk in particular. In the second, they want the floppy disk, and it happens to be blue. The "which" is added to aid the listener, not to because the color blue is important.
If that's interesting, it's worth Googling for a more precise answer.
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.
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 was going to ask whether articles might go the way of pronouns in that people might latch onto them and start demanding you refer to them only using a particular article when they're not around, like some do with pronouns. Then email signatures could be:
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.
Speed changes it for me too. However, emphasis can also mean using thee. An obnoxious US example is people saying “THEE Ohio State University”, often with a pause after thee as well. It’s not “thee Ohio River”. You would use “thuh”.
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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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'm going to guess this could be a bias from speaking English. In romance languages, for example, you would often use an article rather than a possessive pronoun for this type of construct.
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.
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.)
"They are vendors, not all vendors" is equally natural.
No it isn't. For example, I am a native speaker, and I have no idea what you wanted that sentence to say. There is no available contrast between the emphasized words, leaving me mystified as to why they're both emphasized.
Looking up through the context, I think what you want is "They are vendors, but they aren't all vendors." That's still not a felicitous way to express it; you'd be better off with "They are vendors, but they aren't every vendor." (Because "They aren't all vendors" is most naturally interpreted to mean "not all of them are vendors", with all as an adverb, as opposed to "not all vendors are one of them", with all as a determiner.)
This sounds to me like something a native french speaker would say in english. I feel like most english speakers would respond, “They are vendors,” “Just some vendors,” “It’s some vendors,” or even just “Vendors,” but not “They are some vendors.”
Back in the days when I had to take some latin for my studies, our lecturer always used to say "don't ask my why, latin might be more logical than most languages, but it's a language not math. Languages are not logical". It actually became a bit of a running gag because we still had some students who needed to ask why for every rule.
There's a reason your parent comment expected some to be "an article". It is the plural of a(n). It's just that the term "article" was defined not to include it. There's a different word for the part of speech.
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.
In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
Why? It's very common in English:
I don't want those ones.
In this case the number has been repurposed as a placeholder noun, and the noun is what's pluralized, but that's also what happens when the number is repurposed as a determiner and the determiner gets pluralized.
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".
It's uncommon, but without thinking about it, I wouldn't have noticed that I wouldn't usually add the "ein" here. I think it emphasizes the affiliation to the group of people.
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?
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.
The really common "determiners" are this, that, and possessive forms such as their and your.
People often call those last words (your, his) "possessive pronouns", which always confused me because they are obviously not nouns. They are actually "possessive determiners", which is quite logical. The possessive pronouns are mine, ours, etc.
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.
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.
That sounds odd. Like in your example the nature answer would be “He’s the games master”. Without “the” article, one could get confused like okay is he the game master for this game or is he just a game master for some other game
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 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.
A good parallel in English is actually “going to (or being at) school.” While you can say you’re at “the” school or “a school”, they mean different things than just being at school. Ditto for UK “to hospital.” (Cf. to university, to college, to city hall, in government)
Notably these are not the norm in English, but they do illustrate the pattern.
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?)
That's just a historical quirk of the terminology. A(n) and the were named articles for no particular reason.
They belong to a much broader part of speech, called "determiners", and some is a determiner just like they are.
But that’s because that’s a situation where there’s only one president. If you were in a situation where there were multiple presidents you would definitely say he’s a president.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Spanish 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 |
For anyone interested in getting "more 9s" from the heuristics and then building something useful with it, come join us at https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z32314
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.
The one that gets me is when people use "a" with initialisms, e.g. "She drives a RV," just sounds off to me. she can do her thing but I drive an RV.
That said, I think the former might be more common these days, so arguably the rules might just differ between written an spoken English in some dialects.
Every language has its own quirks. In Chinese, you don't have this a/an difficulty, but the grammatical tenses are so fluid that a lot of contextual cues are needed to make sense whether "I went" [zoule 走了] means I really went in the past, or I am going now (ignoring the semantic diff as well, since zou also means to pass away).
Actually, it does, it's just not so fixed about them.
For instance: "I have gone", "I had gone" are said the same way, but there is a slight difference when you say "I have been going" and there is really no way to say "I had been going" unless contextual tokens are added onto.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
A related quirk is English people saying "an hotel" (pronounced an otel). It's a subset, and specifically more popular with English speakers as opposed to non-English British. Also, someone else claimed the English don't say "an historic" - incorrect. Again it's not universal.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
[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)
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).
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.
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?
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).
That is probably on of the most confusing things about English. What do you mean "sounds like a vowel"? All vowels sound like vowels, what else would they sound like? While we're at the subject, why is Y not a vowel (except when it is) and why can you have more than one vowel in a syllable. In the example in the article they have unicorn, which is clearly spelled wrong if English were to make sense. The correct spelling should be "junicorn". Fixed.
Counting the number of syllables in a language like Danish means you just count the number of vowels. A syllable must have one, and only one, vowel. A word like "you", if it existed in Danish, would have three syllables, because all those letters are vowels, at any point in time.
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.
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!
As 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.
Genders 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
For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.
Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense.
In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists):
First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative.
So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself".
Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly).
Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither").
After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period.
Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.
Interestingly my language has both genders and (reduced but present) animate-inanimate distinction. It also used to have singular, plural and "double" declination. As far as I understand this all was originally "invented" in proto-indo-european. Man, PIE was wild.
one thing that doesn't fit is that I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split. but from my (not so vast) knowledge, the split is either (mostly) the last letter of the word, or a list of suffixes
It's like everything else, natural languages have some redundancy so you can understand the other party even when you failed to catch ~10% of they were saying. A binary gender, like in French, is one more bit of information. German also has neutral, so one more trit.
As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex if you're a native speaker (basically nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender when speaking/writing). As for their role, I think they may work as a simple error correction code (if genders in the sentence don't match, you misheard something)
FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.
Of course this is very complex and not intuitive if you're a language learner. My point was that while there are parts of grammar that native speakers struggle with, and kids drill them for good grades in school, this is not one of that parts. And my broader point was that "needlessly pointless part of the language" is subjective and something language users should judge.
In languages with genders you need fewer unique words for gender-related concepts. For example English (genderless) has "boy" and "girl", while Spanish (male and female) has "niño" and "niña".
Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine.
Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
Er, that sounds backwards to me. I thought you put the a on the word because it is feminine. You're saying the word is feminine because there's an a on it?
This is often apparent from the sound or spelling of a word, rather than any genderedness in its concept. A chair is une chaise (feminine), and it would be weird for chaise to be masculine. It’s not because the chair is feminine, it’s because the word is. There are some rules that help you figure out the gender based on the word (often what sound the word ends with), but there are exceptions to those rules.
Livre (book) is actually an example of where the gender creates a different meaning: un livre is a book, while une livre is a pound (the unit of weight).
On one hand I agree genders are pointless for chair and book. On the other hand, many nouns are the female or augmentative version of the base word. From your examples: "silla" (f, chair) vs "sillón" (m, sofa), and "libro" (m, book) vs "libreta" (f, notebook).
If you ever feel inclined to learn Hindi there is more to grapple with. The verb gender is sometimes set by the gender of the object, sometimes by the gender of the object. Which way this will go loosely depends on tense.
As far as I know, articles of Ancient Greek adhere to roughly the same declension rules as nouns, with a little bit of irregular changes. And as for modern languages like Italian and French, their articles, while being irregular, are mostly inherited from Latin demonstratives ille, illa, illud, knowing this might help memorize the many forms.
This 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.
Any verdict for "historic"?
It depends on if you're speaking British or American English.
The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.
I don't think so. This one seems to defy the rule.
"A his-toric day"
"An his-toric day"
Both seem to work correctly with American pronunciation.
Journalists and films seem to use "an historic" with an American accent, which breaks the rule but still feels correct.
For most words the indefinite article is clear. This one feels weird.
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.
No it doesn't. If I pronounce the "h", then using "an" sounds weird. If I don't, then "a" sounds weird.
Curious if you have a link to a video of this, I can't imagine it sounding correct.
I didn't know about "an historic" until I heard it from American journalists. They did pronounce the 'h' and it did indeed sound very wrong. I believe I first heard it from Rachel Maddow. I can't find any clips, but there are a bunch of transcripts from her show if you search up:
For example:
- https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47356492
- https://www.ms.now/transcript/2013-11-21-msna738766
It's one of those things American pseudo intellectuals do because they think it's more correct and want to sound superior. Maybe they heard a professor say it that way or read it in a book. Anything but actually process why the a/an distinction exists.
Sportscasters 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.
"The British" aren't monolithic and neither are our approaches to this.
I certainly don't say "it is an historic day" or "staying at an hotel" with the soft H, because to me, in the 21st century, it's an upper class affectation (I am from a middle class background and from the commuter belt 30 miles south of London).
I moved to a slightly posher place and I know people who do say "an historic day" (soft H) still but it's largely out of habit/age/schooling.
The BBC have stopped doing this, as a rule. The monarchy have moderated this aspect of their speech too — I am sure I remember the younger Prince Charles say "an historic day" with the soft H, but I am fairly sure he would now say "a historic day" with the hard H; he has been trying to progressively moderate his RP accent for the last 25 years or so.
ETA: clarification in reply to reply
My point is that it's based on pronunciation. I didn't mean to offend you.
No offence taken — I just mean to clarify that the proportion of British speakers who do this an-then-soft-H thing is actually pretty small.
Having said that, there are two constituencies that do it, I guess:
- Those who do it out of upper class background or affectation: using the French soft H that survives in the American pronunciation of 'herbs' is a class signifier.
- And those who do it out of broader dropped-H slackness; it's not out of the question that someone would say "it's an 'istoric day" run together, in a variety of regional and rural accents.
So if you meant the latter, then, yes! Probably more people do it as a result of dropping H more generally than out of upper class identification.
But in the middle of those two, most of us, I think, use the hard H, and certainly "BBC English" has moved in that direction.
The majority of British accents would pronounce the 'h'.
but not, apparently, the haitch
I have seen an American book, published in the 1960s, whose title included "An Historical Survey".
For me, on this one, if there's an "an", it pushes me to not pronounce the "h" in the next word, even though I consider it silly to pronounce "historical" that way.
No they don't - eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Britain_(TV_serie...
Both occur, but "a historic" is standard choice in modern English.
Since most speakers pronounce the h, it takes "a" not "an".
Contrast to "an hour", where the h is silent.
And for 'herb' it depends on which dialect of English you speak.
Both are being used and neither is incorrect. “An historic” used to be more prevalent in British English until around 1990, but “a historic” has become the standard choice now: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+historic%2Ca...
Depends on whether or not you pronounce the H.
An would always be wrong here, in the U.S. at least.
I've spent some time thinking about this before, and it provides a clue about the writers accent. For example:
"An 'H'", and "a 'H'" are both equally valid following this rule (by my interpretation), depending on how you pronounce the letter 'H'.
A/an herb, for example.
/heitsh/ vs /eitsh/. I think it's mostly Irish with the former.
And Australian, I believe.
I'm Australian, and I say 'A Hotel', and 'A Herb'. Until very recently, I'd never heard anyone ever say it differently.
GP is talking about the name of the letter H like when you're saying the ABCs. How do you pronounce it?
"I think it's mostly Irish with the former."
Actually, it's a shibboleth. It used to be said in Ireland that Roman Catholic called it "haitch" and Protestants called it "aitch". "Haitch" is to be found furth of Ireland though.
Most English accents don't drop the "h" in herb, although American influence will change that.
But you can hear "an" used in phrases like "an hotel" or "an historic building", where the "h" is usually pronounced.
Most Americans don't pronounce the "h" in "herb" or "herbal" afaict. We do usually pronounce it in people's names though, like "Herb".
Maybe this could be used to track how some spoken language changes over time in a region or across regions.
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.
Just curious, what is your native tongue?
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?
(Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate, but Hungarian most definitely has determinate and indeterminate articles.)
Finnish doesn't.
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.
As far as I know (and as confirmed by Wikipedia [1]), Sorbian does not have articles. Maybe you are thinking of Bulgarian, which does have articles (although the definite article attaches as a suffix to the noun, rather than being an independent word).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages
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:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277973156_Unarticul...
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.
My guess: Czech. :)
Native English speakers living for a decade or more in the Czech Republic (and picking up Czech in the process) may experience "retroactive article confusion", they may start to drop articles while speaking their mother tongue English.
Close. It's Polish.
don't worry too much. english is such a muddled tongue to begin with that there are many ways of saying something "correctly" and few if any of us know them all. anyone who quibbles over some fine verbal point is probably not someone whose opinion you should value!
that said I know in business communication this kind of thing can be less forgiving. i will say that grammar and syntax checking for non native speakers is one of the few very beneficial applications of LLMs.
Tongue?
In this sense, it's a synonym for "language". Usually used as "mother tongue" (meaning, the language one grew up speaking).
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.
Just remmeber that "a" is short for "any". So do want the specific thing, or will any thing work?
a specific thing, or is it enough for it to be the thing?
sorry, just joking, this is not meant to be a genuine counterargument^^
I just want one of the new triple-cheese sandwiches please. And the salad of the day as a side.
But... "So do you want _a_ specific thing, or will any thing work?" sounds kind of correct as well to me. (Disclaimer: I am not native speaker, grain of salt and all.)
It is. Yours is acknowledging that your things are distinguishable and the other person might want one in particular.
GP's should be used when offering a specific one, like "the red one".
If only it were that simple. "I bought a car yesterday" -- Did I buy a specific car?
Yes you bought the car yesterday - it’s the now because it’s established in the conversation.
The point is that in saying "I bought a car", you're not attempting to specify which specific car you bought. The fact that you obviously did buy a specific car isn't relevant to the grammar of this.
If the audience already has some context about which specific car you were going to buy, then you could say "I bought the car yesterday." In that case you're referring to a specific car that the audience is expected to already be familiar with.
I think some of the confusion over this seems to be coming from attempting to apply knowledge that you have to a sentence when the audience wouldn't have that knowledge.
You did, but you aren’t specifying which.
“I bought the car” would indicate that you bought a specific one that is jointly understood.
In fact, if you had previously talked about a specific car you were thinking about buying, “I bought a car” would be a strong indicator that you bought a different vehicle than what was discussed.
If there's more than one, and you don't care which one, then it's "a". If you care which one then it's "the".
"Pass me a plate" - any plate will do. "Pass me the plate" - I want the specific plate which we were talking about.
That rule isn’t universal though. “I go to the dentist every year” doesn’t imply that I particularly care about a specific dentist (or, case in point, about the specific dentist).
“This was a nice evening” is also difficult to characterize as not caring about which evening it is. As are books titled “An Introduction to XYZ”, where both the authors and the readers will probably care about the specific book.
I'm going to the bank, the shop, the dentist, the pool - I have a regular one in mind and you may well also know which one I mean.
I'm going to a bank, a shop, a dentist - I've found a new one and I may well be about to describe it to you.
"A nice evening" - there have been ones before, there hopefully will be again, this was one of them.
Sure, but that’s different from “you do/don't care which one”.
“Care” may not be the correct word, but in those examples the difference is whether you are referring to a specific instance, or any instance of a group. When you say “I went to the doctor,” you did in fact go to a specific doctor (or “I will go to the doctor” meaning you will go to one). It would be equally valid to say “I went to a doctor”, it’s just less specific.
I believe it is food for thought — would one ever say "this was the nice evening"?
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
“At the start of the year, my crystal ball told me that all my evenings this year are going to be bad except for one. This was the nice evening.”
Absent any context, “the nice evening” sounds strange because no one really expects there to be only one nice evening.
However it can makes sense if the surrounding context supports the idea of only one nice evening.
Grammar rules are generally about the surrounding context which allow us to leave out superfluous or repeated information and still be understood. Things sound strange when that missing information can’t be deduced from context.
Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the very least, it counts as a separate usage of “the” that doesn’t follow the usual pattern, like when you say “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”.
Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620015
Looking at: https://advice.writing.utoronto.ca/english-language/definite...
I think the usage falls into this group: "The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.
So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.
I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.
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.
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.
I understand this mostly as "our house is one of a set of houses with pools", which is what anybody cares about in this sentence.
It's like saying "our house has a roof" — very similar, but nobody really cares about the roof, the focus remains on the house.
This doesn’t count because the determination of which house you mean is not based on previous context, but only on the sentence itself.
Do you mean pool?
The reason you say "our house has a pool" is not that you're not referring to a specific pool. It's that the pool you're referring to is not already present in the conversational context, and it needs to be introduced. A(n) performs that introduction.
If you refer to that same pool without introducing it, it will still be marked for definiteness - compare my pool, my house's pool, or the pool at my house. But your example sentence doesn't work that way.
(Note that the three phrases I listed are all bare noun phrases that can't stand as sentences. Note also that if you used one of those phrases when your listener wasn't already aware that you had a pool, they might feel that you "moved too fast" in the conversation, assuming that they knew about your pool when they didn't.)
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?").
I appreciate your good faith, the suggestions, and your elaboration on them.
For context, extensive coding over two decades has ingrained in me the habit of explicitly disambiguating my statements of machine-executable logic expressed in natural language from personal guesswork and opinions.
I should integrate your suggestion and try not to explicitly qualify my guesswork. Using passively implied qualifiers in the structure of my opinion pieces would be a step in the right direction.
"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.
The dentist, the supermarket, the park, etc.
Because you are referring to a specific one of each, even if a listener doesn’t necessarily know which specific one, they know that you know.
In the case of your example the listener assumes you mean whichever specific dentist you are currently seeing. That fact that you may choose one randomly each time is an exception.
Nope! Because "the" also refers to a class/category which is essentially the opposite of indicating a particular member.
For instance, "the bald eagle is native to North America".
There is also "The" in names; The Beatles, The Great Lakes, The Bahamas, The Bronx, ...
The role of "the" depends on context: how was the subject treated in previous sentences in the conversation.
"I see a bald eagle out of the window. The bald eagle is huge!"
In this second sentence, there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles, because the previous sentence introduces the topic of the sighting of a bald eagle. It refers to that one.
If "the bald eagle is huge" appears out of the blue, not preceded by any discussion of any eagle, that tends to bring in the class interpretation.
I learned the above through Japeanese. A similar thing happens with the は (wa) topic particle; I realized that "the" works in a similar way in that regard.
That much is obvious and everyone learns it like on the first week of English learning, of course. It’s the various cases where that simple rule doesn’t apply that are difficult.
"I play the piano"
And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!
And "There is a piano in the lobby."
This doesn't touch place names. The Hague, Amsterdam, The Maldives, Australia, The Netherlands, France...
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.
If there was only one castle then you would save the. For example our town has “the giant duck” (fictional fibreglass statue)
I don't know... "What sets your town apart from all the others?" "It had a giant fibreglass duck" also works.
We could avoid this issue all together by simply building several giant fiberglass ducks.
"Our town has the castle" would mean that of (all the gin joints in) all the towns in all the world, only yours has a castle. Also not academically qualified, also a native speaker.
Not quite.
You use either “a” or “the” when you are specifying a class of things. “Our town has a castle” could be any castle. “Our town has the castle” would be a bit more rare and sounds weird as a general statement, but is valid in certain circumstances. “The castle” here means that the castle is something, or connected to something we have already been discussing and I’m referring to it, so the “our town” must be the new information. Like maybe we are discussing what we should do when you next visit, and I suggest seeing some particular famous tapestries. You say “wait, isn’t that castle [in which the tapestry is displayed] in Edinburgh?” And I reply “no, our town has the castle.”
You don’t use any article at all when what you’re talking about is unique. For example, “our town has Neuschwanstein Castle.”
Edit: or there is something which follows, e.g. “our town has the castle where they filmed Braveheart.”
Fair. I was envisioning the statement "our town has the castle" outside of any other qualifying context about the castle. Like a couple of schoolchildren bragging about their towns. "Our town has a racetrack." "Well our town has a castle!"
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.
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.
I would take "Our town has the castle" to imply that there's a group of towns that collectively only have one castle, and your town is the one that has it.
Compare: "Sacramento is the capital." You could say Sacramento is a capital if the reference group includes Albany, Austin, Tallahassee, etc. Or you could say Sacramento is the capital if the reference group includes Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, etc.
Yeah, I think this is the same case as the example above by someone else: "Our house has a pool". I offer "Our house has a roof" as well.
Speaking of the house or town, the important information is what class it belongs to, not the specific castle/pool/roof...
As you point out, "the" will have a very specific, highlighting meaning in that case.
"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 leads to some funny situations.
This one time I was at a company get-together and the CTO, whose son was just born, received some Peppa Pig merch.
I exclaimed (in English) "Peppa Pig is the shit!"
The HR lady stared at me as if I killed her father with an accordion.
They probably still would have given you a funny look if you'd exclaimed "Peppa Pig is a shit".
I can't resist linking this bit of linguistic humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
This reminds me of “en” vs “ett” in Swedish. No rules - just gotta know
Der, die, das!
... den, des, dem. But those are derived from the three bass cases.
When I was at Rice a quarter century ago, I took a 300-level linguistics class called Structure of English. Half a dozen of us sat around an oval table in a little room and I was the only one not majoring in linguistics. It was a delightfully geeky bunch. One of the students later worked on speech recognition at Microsoft. The professor was an older tall thin man who always wore suspenders and a bow tie.
I had always been good at grammar in high school, but this was a different world and I had no idea what I was in for. We spent the first two weeks discussing the differences between the and a, and the next two weeks on the differences between this and that, and the rest of the semester felt more abstract. It was quite illuminating for me.
Ablaut reduplication is my favorite thing from linguistics. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English )
Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag.
It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.
Learning about the order of adjectives (big old red ball - try swapping any of those around) when I was dabbling in Klingon and the affix contests ( https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix and https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes ).
And from this we can extrapolate what flip flops would be called if we had three feet!
Also see https://www.poetryverse.com/spike-milligan-poems/on-ning-nan...
Same here. Every few years I try to go through https://englishpage.com/articles/index.htm to internalize more rules but it doesn't fully stick, and it's the only part of English that makes me self-conscious.
In programming terms 'a' is followed by a type name and 'the' is followed by a variable name.
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.
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.
Here I have no idea why in the last sentence you wrote "all the cases" even though cases is already plural. This is not covered by any of the rules people have been posting in this thread. I'm the GP who started the article usage discussion here.
I have no idea why I shouldn't write "all the cases". What are you trying to say?
The word "cases" is already plural. Why does it need an article in front of it? It's one of the usages that trip me up. Why isn't it just "all cases"?
According to most comments here this should be "at a school" then :)
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.
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.
What's interesting about the replies to this comment how readily people provide post-hoc justifications for language features that often have no essential rhyme or reason. The same is true for the prepositions which accompany verbs, which tend to vary by language, but for which every language's speaker will gladly offer you "rules" or "explanations" for when they fit. It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know.
Usually happens when a person answers a "why" question to something they did without thinking.
"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.
Nobody says that. "Give me the blue floppy disk"
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
Even as a native, I didn't know the difference until I looked it up right now, and I'm almost 50.
Short form, for those who wonder:
"That" is used for things that are important, and "which" is used for things that aren't. In the first sentence, they want the blue floppy disk in particular. In the second, they want the floppy disk, and it happens to be blue. The "which" is added to aid the listener, not to because the color blue is important.
If that's interesting, it's worth Googling for a more precise answer.
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.
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".
There's an episode [0] [1] in a famous Canadian comedy that makes fun of this distinction:
[…]
[…]
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/
[1]: https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man
I was going to ask whether articles might go the way of pronouns in that people might latch onto them and start demanding you refer to them only using a particular article when they're not around, like some do with pronouns. Then email signatures could be:
they/them/an
You use the word "a" for interchangeable, fungible items and "the" for specific, unique, non-fungible items.
I'm always curious why sometimes I pronounce the as /ðə/ ("thuh") and sometimes as /ði/ ("thee"). I don't really know what governs this but I expect it's the presence of a vowel at the start of the following word. However, only some vowels. Does anyone have an answer?
I do this too - "thee actual" vs "thuh real" and such. I do expect it's to do with having a vowel sound of a certain kind at the beginning of the next work making you move your tongue in a certain way.
with "the actual" I imagine you're also putting in a kind of intrusive "y" sound so it flows better into the vowel
yep although I don't think it sounds too intrusive. it comes out as theeyactual while the alternative would the thuh.Actual with a sort of micro-accent on the A. I'm sure linguists have names for all these things, like when the movements of the tongue and mouth incidentally form phonemes!
I grew up in New England.
My experience is that "thuh" is basically a lazy / informal pronunciation of that word.
But it's also by far the most common pronunciation. "Thee" would sound strangely hyper-formal, at least in my circles.
Edit: the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609) also rings true to me.
Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?
“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass
“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.
I realized long after the edit window expired that autocorrect changed it to “thus”.
Hmm... I think an /u/ ("oo") triggers "thuh" for me, as in "the ubermensch." But that might just be my idiolect.
This is governed by the following word. "Thee" can also be used for emphasis anywhere.
The official rule I learnt in my English (as foreign language) classes is vowel = thee and consonant = thuh. That's it.
But I noticed that native speakers deviate from this at least in two cases:
1. Use thee to emphasize the following noun
2. When searching for the noun to say, they often get it wrong because they say something like "uh, thee, thee, thee, uh, book" and never sweat it.
Source: I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid and John Cleese does this all the time.
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.
Speed changes it for me too. However, emphasis can also mean using thee. An obnoxious US example is people saying “THEE Ohio State University”, often with a pause after thee as well. It’s not “thee Ohio River”. You would use “thuh”.
I learned English as a second language and was taught it was thee before vowel sounds and thuh before consonants. Is it wrong?
Fun fact an adder (snake) was once a nadder, and an apron was on a napron. This fun fact brought to you by The History of English Podcast.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
Happily sourced in Wikipedia so I don't have to figure out which episode I learned that from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder <- see below the table in Taxonomy.
And cherries were ceries from French, leading to the singular form cherry. Lots of neat little things like this.
And peas was both singular and plural like fish.
"I ate a single peas" "I ate many peas"
People thought it was a mistake and generated "pea" for a new singular.
Swedish 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"
German does it too: ein Keks = a cookie
That is my favorite podcast of all time!
"if words starts with hones" fails for "hones" itself; I suspect that should have been "honest" in the code.
Good catch — "homes" wasn't in my /usr/share/dict/words for some reason so I missed this case!
I notice "an" is in decline in some forms of spoken English. I noticed this shift years ago. Some English speakers say "a (y)apple" rather than "an apple" or "a(y) orange" rather than "an orange". In some case the "y" sound is replaced by a glottal stop (a' apple, a' orange).
[Why is this getting voted down? Bizarre.]
No
Eh? I hear both of these on a regular basis. It is a phenomenon.
It might be regional? I haven't noticed it in the northeastern US, or in the multinational company I work at, where I talk regularly with people from at least 10 countries.
I 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.
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.
a.k.a. "hard attack". There's a nice video on the subject by linguist Geoff Lindsey: https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ
Some YouTubers always say a like the letter a (e.g. the vowel in "day")
I find it pretty annoying. A different YouTuber had a good video about it though https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJLyFAzYes&ra=m
I can tell you did not use AN llm to write this post. Thanks.
As a non speaker, I really hate this rule
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 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.
Heh, while we're discussing English, this annoys me.
"The further back you go" is a continuum, the effect you describe should be too.
Or match a discontinuity with a discontinuity.
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.
The whole (over)insistence on using the determiners in general seems to be a relatively recent innovation as well, the articles being a large part of it. I am talking about constructions like "he shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet" — why not just "he shoved hand into pocket and pulled out wallet"? The context is pretty self-evident, and if you really need to specify some deviation from it (he shoved his hand into someone else's pocket, but still pulled out his wallet), you always can do it by, you know, using the determiners; except now they actually will be non-redundant.
Indeed that begins to sound like so called caveman talk. He shove hand in pocket and pull out wallet.
And yet e.g. włożył rękę do kieszeni i wyjął portfel is a pretty natural-sounding Polish sentence. Grug trusts others not stupid.
I don't think the context is self evident at all. It's very important to know whose pocket he picked.
I'm going to guess this could be a bias from speaking English. In romance languages, for example, you would often use an article rather than a possessive pronoun for this type of construct.
I suppose you could say, “they are both doctors” or “they are all doctors.”
Those sound fine to me, depending on context.
Yes, but then it may sound as if "both/all" is being highlighted which it isn't in the neutral "they are doctors" statement
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.
There is no plural equivalent of a/an. So where you would use a/an becomes no-article for plural nouns.
It’s simply that, in English, there is no indefinite plural article — or, equivalently, that the indefinite plural article is null. So ‘they are doctors’ is consistent with the behaviour of plural nouns elsewhere.
Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.
English still feels hard to explain when things sound natural and when they don't.
You can say "there are some vendors in the street" and it sounds normal. But if you were to say "they are some vendors" it sounds weird. It's pretty firmly more natural to say "they are vendors."
Oh, certainly, as is the case for any language!
In the case you mention, I note that Huddleston & Pullum in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language specifically call ‘some’ an existential determiner. As is usual with them, this is an insightful observation: you use ‘some <noun>’ specifically in order to say that there exists some set of things drawn from some larger set or in some configuration. You say ‘there are some vendors in the street’ because you’re drawing attention to their existence in the street (and indeed ‘there is/are’ is the prototypical English expression for existentials). You don’t say ‘they are some vendors’, because the use of ‘they’ implies some specific group of vendors already known to both speaker and listener — highlighting their existence again feels weird.
(Of course, this analysis is still incomplete. At some point you simply have to list all the specific ways in which ‘some’ is used — which, indeed, is exactly what Huddleston & Pullum do. Furthermore I’m certain that there is some discourse context in which ‘they are some vendors’ would be natural, even though I haven’t managed to think of one just yet.)
I'm not sure this is the best achievable example, but maybe:
"The street vendors have decided to oppose the ordinance."
"But I thought Mike and Jacob said they support the ordinance. And Julia! Aren't they vendors?"
"They are some vendors, but most vendors take the opposite position."
That one is more natural without the word "some" imo
I agree, so it's still not an ideal example.
Depends where the stress is.
"They are some vendors, not all vendors" is natural.
"They are vendors, not all vendors"is equally natural.
Written without stress indicators, most dialog can sound unnatural.
No it isn't. For example, I am a native speaker, and I have no idea what you wanted that sentence to say. There is no available contrast between the emphasized words, leaving me mystified as to why they're both emphasized.
Looking up through the context, I think what you want is "They are vendors, but they aren't all vendors." That's still not a felicitous way to express it; you'd be better off with "They are vendors, but they aren't every vendor." (Because "They aren't all vendors" is most naturally interpreted to mean "not all of them are vendors", with all as an adverb, as opposed to "not all vendors are one of them", with all as a determiner.)
More simply: "Some vendors support the ordinance, but most oppose it."
"Who are the noisy people outside?"
"They are some vendors" seems natural to me, suggesting that the group of vendors is known to the person answering.
This sounds to me like something a native french speaker would say in english. I feel like most english speakers would respond, “They are vendors,” “Just some vendors,” “It’s some vendors,” or even just “Vendors,” but not “They are some vendors.”
And “they are some vendors” usually actually means “they are excellent vendors”!
Really depends on how you say “some”
I will die on the hill that "SOME PIG" from Charlotte's Web was merely an existential determiner.
Exceptional rather than excellent I'd say, i.e. not necessarily positively exceptional.
And doesn't "some vendors they are" mean the opposite?
Back in the days when I had to take some latin for my studies, our lecturer always used to say "don't ask my why, latin might be more logical than most languages, but it's a language not math. Languages are not logical". It actually became a bit of a running gag because we still had some students who needed to ask why for every rule.
There's a reason your parent comment expected some to be "an article". It is the plural of a(n). It's just that the term "article" was defined not to include it. There's a different word for the part of speech.
Is French different? Il est un médecin? Il est médecin? Ils sont médecins sounds fine.
Nope, it's basically as in spanish:
Nope that's bogus french: you say "il est médecin". But you can say: "c'est un médecin".
To expand a bit, it's a perfectly valid use, but most people will forgo having an extra word that has no role in the phrase.
"Il est médecin" and "Il est un médecin" are perfectly equivalent so people will choose the shorter.
The "un" comes back when using the noun as an adjective isn't possible anymore, e.g. by adding an actual adjective "Il est un bon médecin"
In "They are doctors" the 'they' is the subject and you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.
But in "The doctors are female" you do because the subject is some specific group of doctors. It's singular because its a single group of things.
But why not? Plural indefinite article exists in some languages, why not in English?
I can’t speak about other languages but in my head the simplest reason is that English “a/an” specifies “one”, eg “I have a cat and two dogs.” I googled and confirmed a/an is Old English for “one” but otherwise they didn’t use articles. I assume it’s a similar origin story for other languages like “un/una/une”. In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
Why? It's very common in English:
I don't want those ones.
In this case the number has been repurposed as a placeholder noun, and the noun is what's pluralized, but that's also what happens when the number is repurposed as a determiner and the determiner gets pluralized.
Certainly English can be odd. It can usually be understood through tough thorough thought though.
A thorough thought, though a tough one to plough through.
Over-learning Portuguese (as a beginner) almost make me feel that "He is a doctor" should become "They are as doctors".
Interstingly it is the same in german, you would say "Er ist Arzt" not "Er ist ein Arzt". Which makes me wonder why english uses an indefinite article there, since it doesn't seem to be either germanic or romantic in origin.
This was the root of the overblown Kennedy gaffe where he said “ich bin ein Berliner” instead of “ich bin berliner.”
The thing is that doesn't even sound wrong and I don't think any native speaker would object to the article when used with a place of origin/belonging in a speech.
It emphasizes the statement if you ask me.
Only many years after learning of the speech I read online that it's allegedly "a gaffe".
It's uncommon, but without thinking about it, I wouldn't have noticed that I wouldn't usually add the "ein" here. I think it emphasizes the affiliation to the group of people.
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.)
In this specific case the "ein" emphasizes/expresses that he "is one of us" to the Berliners. Not a gaffe at all, in my opinion.
Eh, Italian has it tho.
"(Lui) è un dottore", "(Io) sono un dottore".
"Un" is the indefinite article.
Subject is usually dropped, thus the brackets
German speaker here, you can say either and they're both equally correct, don't pretent to be some sort linguistic savant here lmfao
You are right most of the time for English, but today that should be "Arrr! He be the sawbones".
Spain had pirates too, but I don't speak Spanish so had to ask an LLM. It suggested that today in Spanish it would be "Él es el matasanos del barco". Any authentic Spanish pirates who can verify or correct that?
Not a pirate but a Spanish speaker.
Interestingly,
He's a doctor [in general] -> el es médico
He's the ship's doctor [this specific ship] -> el es el médico del barco
He's a ship doctor [generally works in ships] -> el es médico de barco
Matasanos is slang for a bad doctor of dubious talent, it literally means someone who kills healthy people xD
You can say "they are the doctors" -- but yeah it's a slightly different meaning.
BTW in German, it's a fun distinction. The old "ich bin (ein) Berliner". (or hamburger or frankfurter...)
Works in English too:
* I am Danish.
* I am a Danish.
Or
* I am dancer.
* I am a dancer.
“I am dancer” is acceptable if you’re a five year old. However “I’m Danish” is correct English
In "I'm Danish" it's an adjective. With "I'm a Danish" it's a noun, stating you are a pastry.
But only in US English!
You can say “I’m Danish” or “I’m British”. If you want to use an article and convey the same meaning then it would be “I’m a Dane” or I’m a Brit”
Here the 'a' is shifting position to become the world final 's'
It is not the set-pertinence that would get transformed into a plural.
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.
At last, some actual linguistics.
The really common "determiners" are this, that, and possessive forms such as their and your.
People often call those last words (your, his) "possessive pronouns", which always confused me because they are obviously not nouns. They are actually "possessive determiners", which is quite logical. The possessive pronouns are mine, ours, etc.
You should not look at superficial similarities between languages, but at logic.
To the question: "What is he?", the answer can be "He is married, tall, doctor in medicine".
On another point of view, "He is a doctor" = "one in the set of the doctors". (But which one of the crowd there? The tall one is the doctor.)
"He is doctor in medicine": identity; "He is a doctor": aside property.
With different expressions, you are not expressing the same thing, but different ideas (some of them more preponderant in use in a territory).
Similarities between languages is a much more intuitive approach for non-English speakers. This comment just explains an English idiom in terms of English idioms.
If they are substantial instead of superficial.
the logic behind it. Which is common to many languages.
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.
Do you also feel «forced and unnatural»
"Il est médecin // il est un médecin // il est le médecin"? "Él es médico // él es un médico" // él es il médico"?
Are you feeling through memory or through logic? Why would it work in some languages but not other related ones?
What about "He is Commander, General, Loyal Servant, Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife"?
That is because 'tall' and 'married' are adjectives. So: "a tall fellow, a married man, and a doctor in medicine".
English would work for titles:
He is President.
He is Doctor. (Dr.)
"He is president" is different than "he is a president" (one among many) or "he is the president" (the one specific).
But it would have to be within the context of titles
With the specific case, the "the" could be dropped - "who is in running this rpg?" points "he is gamesmaster" which means "he is the gamesmaster".
Probably because it's a role, similar to the title?
That sounds odd. Like in your example the nature answer would be “He’s the games master”. Without “the” article, one could get confused like okay is he the game master for this game or is he just a game master for some other game
I think because someone wouldn't answer "he is a gamesmaster" to the example question, "who is running this rpg", it makes it less odd.
If the Q was "who can run this game?" maybe then it would be ambiguous because it could imply others may also be a gamesmaster.
So the context of dropping the "the" can only really happen when there's no ambiguity.
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.
In spanish you also have to use a/an:
Es un perro (its a dog)
Saying "es perro" makes no sense.
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.
A good parallel in English is actually “going to (or being at) school.” While you can say you’re at “the” school or “a school”, they mean different things than just being at school. Ditto for UK “to hospital.” (Cf. to university, to college, to city hall, in government)
Notably these are not the norm in English, but they do illustrate the pattern.
il est docteur
vs
c'est un docteur
See also "he's in hospital" and "he's in the hospital" in British and American English.
That's just a historical quirk of the terminology. A(n) and the were named articles for no particular reason.
They belong to a much broader part of speech, called "determiners", and some is a determiner just like they are.
It's the same in Italian, but also the same in English. You say "he's president", not "he's a president", for instance.
But that’s because that’s a situation where there’s only one president. If you were in a situation where there were multiple presidents you would definitely say he’s a president.
Same in French, Dutch, and probably other languages for “he is doctor” or “I am doctor”
Same for Portuguese.
Same in French.
It's just that professions are properties.
then you have cases where English skips an article but Spanish does not, such as "what is science fiction?" vs. "¿qué es la cienca ficción?"
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 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.
An historic just sounds pretentious, sorry :p
You don’t have to apologize, I don’t like it either.
Some people pronounce nvidia as nuhvidia others as envidia so when the writer puts "a" or "an" before it they're revealing how they pronounce it
I always wondered if some uses of the word 'and' I notice on occasion might have similar explanations, or if they were the result of misspelling, mistyping, incorrect autocorrect, etc.. anyone know?
Examples from published articles: "Barely half and hour was on the clock" "the hospital, which is in and area of central Homs" "spiraled into and armed uprising and civil war" "During and interview with ABC in July"
These are typical errors made by the native speakers. Most (every?) language has rules, which are more difficult for a native speaker to follow vs. a well-spoken foreigner.
Other examples in English are:
- who vs whom
- then vs than
- ask vs acks
Less vs fewer.
Very few people say "acks" instead of "ask". It's not a common error at all. I would say "who"/"whom" is the only truly common one you listed, though screwing up "than"/"then" is at least common enough that one runs into it with some regularity.
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.
Which region? I’d say it’s more tied to African American vernacular.
This reminds me of the multiple AI videos out there that I have to involuntarily listen to because people hate using earphones/headphones. They just start off like "The man/woman blah blah blah", and my poor brain is always noting that's bad English/grammar or whatever because What man/woman are you talking about? Where did he/she come from in this story that you just started telling?
It could be a gimmick to grab attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
Lots of novels start off with "the gardener put down the gun" or "the elephant was never recovered" or "the money was meant to be in the shoebox" or something as a way of arousing the reader's curiosity, or making the reader feel like an active participant in some larger story that's already underway, even though this is technically bad pragmatics in the sense that it isn't cooperating with the reader's assumed desire to understand the context of the utterance.
In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.
The rule is fairly simple as it was taught to me - if the word (apple) begins with a vowel sound, use “an” to avoid cacophony. Same way one uses “o” (means “or” in Spanish) but “u” if the next word begins with a vowel.
What matters is the sound though, not the character - so it’s not as trivial to algorithmize. Eg. A hammock, an hour.
This is covered exactly in the post right under that sentence. Why just restate it?
i think this post with more details would be a better link: https://www.redblobgames.com/x/2635-a-vs-an/. The graph of exceptional cases is particularly interesting.
(Besides, it clarifies the colour scheme — the red vs black went totally unnoticed to my colourblind eye.)
Thanks, I was wondering about the exceptions!
"a whole nother" is one of my favorite linguistic quirks.
"an apron" used to be "a napron"
It's avoiding two distinct vowel sounds in succession.
Consider other variations of this rule.
In French, one would say "l'hôpital" rather than "le hôpital" because the 'h' is an aspirated breath (try saying "a aspirated" rather than "an aspirated") leading to an initial vowel sound.
In Irish, the word for father is "athair". To say "her father" it becomes "a hathair" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothesis_(linguistics)
In Turkish, it can be seen with araba (car). "I saw the car" -> "Arabayı gördüm." (note the 'y' to avoid two vowels). Book is kitap and "I saw the book" is "Kitabı gördüm." Which doesn't need the additional consonant sound between the final sound and the "ı".
Whatever language you speak, it likely has some form of this rule.
And other languages have the quirk too (like the "a unicorn" or "a university"). For example, in French there's l’hôtel and l'hôpital. But if you've got the hedge... it's la haie... or even more egregiously, the marmoset is le ouistiti.
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
Spanish 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-ag...
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.
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.
I think that's one regional. It'd be super weird to pronounce the h in homage in most of Canada ime.
Words are often pronounced differently in English depending on whether they are being used in a noun or verb context.
e.g. attribute, increase, conduct
thanks for the confession, you are simply guilty of ignorance. I on the other hand am guilty of thinking the English and the French both sound pretentious about pretty much everything: they are both always judging people.
here you go, some straight facts:
https://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-historic-vs-an-historic/
including "The Google Ngram Viewer provides an interesting look at the progress of “an historic” vs “a historic.” In 1800, “a historic” barely shows. It begins its rise in the 1820s. In 1869, “a historic” is neck and neck with “an historic.” The two travel along fairly close together until the First World War when “an historic” pulls ahead and dominates until 1938. After that, “a historic” becomes the clear winner, although “an historic” and “an historical” remain in use. Here are two recent examples of the use of “an historical” in the context of educated English..."
From your link:
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.
A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.
(Genderswappedstories.com)
And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.
Him always swaps to her
Eg it was him - it was her
But his can swap to her or hers
It is his -> it is hers
It is his thing -> it is her thing.
And her can also swap to him or his
It was her -> it was him
It was her thing -> it was his thing
And hers always swaps to his.
So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!
I had to write a very in-depth algorithm to work out the type of words surrounding the words - if they are nouns, adjectives etc - in each sentence to correctly guess the swaps. But even after that some were unpredictable due to word order keeping the important words apart. all I could do 100% reliably was to flag the ones that might be ambiguous to check. Of course now I could just get an LLM to check it!
Can anyone explain why this happens?
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.
Thank you!
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:
Thank you!
For anyone interested in getting "more 9s" from the heuristics and then building something useful with it, come join us at https://www.wikifunctions.org/wiki/Z32314
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.
That’s confusing because I was taught whether something is vowel or consonant is the spoken, not written, truth.
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.
When people get this wrong, ask them to spell it out phonetically. We sometimes forget that our language is more based on sound than sight.
An arrvee.
But I bet she drives a Recreational Vehicle instead of an Recreational Vehicle.
I once wrote “an FAQ” and someone corrected me that it should be “a FAQ”. Turns out she pronounced it “fak” and not “ef ay cue”
As a 'fak', pronounce, eff ay queue' is far too long.
Haven’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.
"anorack" is a specific spell checker to tell if we need "a" or "an". It uses espeak to decompose a word into phonemes.
Every language has its own quirks. In Chinese, you don't have this a/an difficulty, but the grammatical tenses are so fluid that a lot of contextual cues are needed to make sense whether "I went" [zoule 走了] means I really went in the past, or I am going now (ignoring the semantic diff as well, since zou also means to pass away).
A more natural way to see it is that Chinese does not really have tenses in the first place.
Actually, it does, it's just not so fixed about them.
For instance: "I have gone", "I had gone" are said the same way, but there is a slight difference when you say "I have been going" and there is really no way to say "I had been going" unless contextual tokens are added onto.
Is it "a LLM" or "an LLM"?
More generally, do you choose the article as if the first letter of the initialism were pronounced or as if the first word of the initialism were pronounced? Does it differ with acronyms? Does it differ between the UK and America?
an, because the spoken sound of "LLM" starts with a vowel, "el". So, pronunciation of first letter of initialism, when you're spelling the initialism. I think.
an LLM, an MP, an FBI agent, a CIA agent, a NASA engineer, an NSA mechanic, an 8 year old car, a 10 year old dog, et cetera – it's the sound of how you said those letters, always the sound.
Also [a history vs. an history][1].
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_...
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.
Be glad you didn’t have to learn German, our grammatical gender only has more exceptions than rules.
It really grinds my gears when someone says “an year”.
You just need to lend an ear.
Who says this? I haven’t heard it once in my life
One fun thing is that some words can reasonably go either way: "a hotel" vs "an hotel" or "a SQL query" vs "an SQL query".
For me, only “a hotel” and “an SQL query” sound correct here
(Edit: I just realised this might be a dialect thing. I say “ess cue ell” and not “sequel”, and “hoe tell” rather than “otel”. Australian accent)
Luckily zed and zee won't flip the article.
a ho.tel
an oh.tel or o.tel (is it still spoken somewhere like this?)
The confusion arrives for words like "herb" depending upon whether the place uses F or C for temperature ;-)
An actual use case for Jev?
So is it "a historic" or "an historic"? I've heard Stephen Colbert use "an historic" with a non-silent H.
Comedians often make jokes.
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.
This 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"?
"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.
Nope. A/an doesn't depend on where the stress in a word is.
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.
I said:
You can say "an 'istoric", but that's not what we're talking about. The overcorrection is "an historic".
That also isn't specific to "historic", for example you can say "an 'ouse" but literally nobody says "an house".
for ESL people, its both.
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
A related quirk is English people saying "an hotel" (pronounced an otel). It's a subset, and specifically more popular with English speakers as opposed to non-English British. Also, someone else claimed the English don't say "an historic" - incorrect. Again it's not universal.
The last time I went down this rabbit hole I concluded these are all correct with identical meaning in U.S. English:
He says he should have used an LLM to write his one-off code
I guess this is a common idea now
Yet since a lot of our coding is for one-offs then we are allowing LLMs to blunt our skills
There's also "the" vs "the". As in "the boy ate the apple". First 'the' ends with a schwa sound. Second 'the' ends with 'ee' sound.
British English speaker: for me, the two 'e's' have the same sound.
The boy The apple.
Though I do say 'thee end'
My Brother says 'barth', I say 'bath'.
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".
Both schwa for me, native speaker who grew up in Scotland.
Both schwa for me unless I was trying to draw particular attention to the apple and denote it was rather significant.
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.
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.
The most problematic for me as a non-native has been "the" vs "nothing", i.e. when one can/should put the definite article.
Pre-LLM I was joking that real AI is whatever can make that decision correctly 100% of times.
As a patron of the 405, there is no consensus.
Try making it with "a" - if thing can be "a thing" then it could be "the thing" but if it can't be "a thing" it definitely can't be "the thing" either.
Right on the money!
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.
"I play the piano" or "I play piano"?
Weirdly, as an en_GB native, neither of these seems wrong to me. I suspect one is British and one is American, and too much TV has driven me to accept the American one.
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.
"i play piano" - i know how to play piano "i play the piano" - i am playing the piano
that is just my intuition as native english speaker, but the former cojld also mean the latter and i have seen it used like such before.
How do you feel about adjective ordering rules? I always wondered what this was like from the outside.
True. That's also a big ambiguity to me. But for some reason I never cared about it as much :/
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?
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 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.
Uniform starts with a y sound and hour has a w sound after the first a - aw ur.
i.e. you have to mentally pronounce the phrase before choosing which form of the indefinite article to write
Which sucks when I'm writing about SQL because it works both ways: "An es-cue-el query" "A sequel query"
Interesting analysis
But correctness is precisely the issue with LLMs?
But also
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)
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).
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.
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.
“An MRI report“ vs “a yogurt container”.
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?
Because “an youghurt container” sounds wrong.
English has this thing where you know you wrote or pronounced something correct if it sounds right.
The one that I often find irritating is SQL...
An "ess queue ell", but a "sequel".
:(
How is that irritating? I find it funny that the article gives you a way to distinguish the way the author pronounces it just from their writing.
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).
That is probably on of the most confusing things about English. What do you mean "sounds like a vowel"? All vowels sound like vowels, what else would they sound like? While we're at the subject, why is Y not a vowel (except when it is) and why can you have more than one vowel in a syllable. In the example in the article they have unicorn, which is clearly spelled wrong if English were to make sense. The correct spelling should be "junicorn". Fixed.
Counting the number of syllables in a language like Danish means you just count the number of vowels. A syllable must have one, and only one, vowel. A word like "you", if it existed in Danish, would have three syllables, because all those letters are vowels, at any point in time.
Two of the three words in your example are proper names, which the author decided not to include.
The full "ub" list in cmudict is: ubben uber ubiquitous ubiquity ubuntu
Ubben is a name as well, so it should leave us with uber, ubiquitous and ubiquity.
I think uber might have been dropped by accident because of Uber.
The A becomes An for the same reason as the linking 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.
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!
Punctuation 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/cha...
impressed and curious
Grammar Nazi here. The first sound in unicorn is a semivowel, not a vowel. You're welcome!
I’m glad this was posted. I’ve always wondered about this but was either too lazy or too afraid to look it up.
As 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.
You probably mean word genders? So you probably say it's sometimes difficult to derive the gender of a noun, hence the correct article
Genders 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
Nevertheless, embedding gender into the language grammar enables many very elegant expressions of phrases as seem in many Latin and Greek poets.
Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
How does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?
For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.
Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense.
In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
FR: « J'ai transporté le canapé (M) et la table (F), mais il (M) s'est cassé. » -> the canapé/sofa is broken.
EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”
Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists):
First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative.
So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself".
Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly).
Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither").
After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period.
Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.
Interestingly my language has both genders and (reduced but present) animate-inanimate distinction. It also used to have singular, plural and "double" declination. As far as I understand this all was originally "invented" in proto-indo-european. Man, PIE was wild.
one thing that doesn't fit is that I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split. but from my (not so vast) knowledge, the split is either (mostly) the last letter of the word, or a list of suffixes
It's like everything else, natural languages have some redundancy so you can understand the other party even when you failed to catch ~10% of they were saying. A binary gender, like in French, is one more bit of information. German also has neutral, so one more trit.
As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex if you're a native speaker (basically nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender when speaking/writing). As for their role, I think they may work as a simple error correction code (if genders in the sentence don't match, you misheard something)
FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.
For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...
Said every native speaker I suppose.
Why abridge (and misrepresent) my quote?
Of course this is very complex and not intuitive if you're a language learner. My point was that while there are parts of grammar that native speakers struggle with, and kids drill them for good grades in school, this is not one of that parts. And my broader point was that "needlessly pointless part of the language" is subjective and something language users should judge.
In languages with genders you need fewer unique words for gender-related concepts. For example English (genderless) has "boy" and "girl", while Spanish (male and female) has "niño" and "niña".
But that doesn't help you understand why "chair" might be feminine while "book" might be masculine.
Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine.
Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
Er, that sounds backwards to me. I thought you put the a on the word because it is feminine. You're saying the word is feminine because there's an a on it?
This is often apparent from the sound or spelling of a word, rather than any genderedness in its concept. A chair is une chaise (feminine), and it would be weird for chaise to be masculine. It’s not because the chair is feminine, it’s because the word is. There are some rules that help you figure out the gender based on the word (often what sound the word ends with), but there are exceptions to those rules.
Livre (book) is actually an example of where the gender creates a different meaning: un livre is a book, while une livre is a pound (the unit of weight).
On one hand I agree genders are pointless for chair and book. On the other hand, many nouns are the female or augmentative version of the base word. From your examples: "silla" (f, chair) vs "sillón" (m, sofa), and "libro" (m, book) vs "libreta" (f, notebook).
If you ever feel inclined to learn Hindi there is more to grapple with. The verb gender is sometimes set by the gender of the object, sometimes by the gender of the object. Which way this will go loosely depends on tense.
And to make things worse, genders differ between languages, say, German, Portuguese, or Slavic languages :)
As far as I know, articles of Ancient Greek adhere to roughly the same declension rules as nouns, with a little bit of irregular changes. And as for modern languages like Italian and French, their articles, while being irregular, are mostly inherited from Latin demonstratives ille, illa, illud, knowing this might help memorize the many forms.
I would take a/an any day over ein/einen/einem/einer/eines in German
That sounds complex as hell
On the other hand it's a nice thing that "kein" and "nein" are different words.
A honest or an honest?
Funny 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.
There are tons of languages that don't use indefinite articles. Russian is a big one, sure.
What about "An honorable man" spoken with an American accent? British accent?
Dialects and syntax are weirdly fascinating .
This 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.