Timeline for When should I use "a" vs "an"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 31 at 3:30 | comment | added | Matemáticos Chibchas | @Dan or that God kills a kitten. | |
| Aug 16, 2015 at 23:29 | comment | added | Angelos | @CarlSmith Young Britons say 'haitch'. The traditional 'aitch' pronunciation is still used by older Britons and certain young Britons such as me. | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 0:46 | comment | added | SevenSidedDie | @Charlie It's a phonological process that just happens to have gotten encoded in the orthography. | |
| Mar 15, 2014 at 1:42 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @tchrist, in most dialects of English, there is a clear sandhi variation of the definite article too: it has a schwa vowel before a consonant sound and an /i/ before a vowel sound. Same distribution as with the indefinite article. That goes for the user vs. the oozer, too (and I wouldn't say there's any epenthetic /j/ in the latter, beyond what is completely automatic between /i/ and /u/). | |
| Dec 23, 2013 at 5:25 | comment | added | tchrist♦ | If someone who oozes could be called an oozer, then I think an the user and the oozer become homophones: an intrusive consonant /j/ appears there between them to create a hiatus. So your sandhi rule happens with definite articles, too: we just don’t write it out. | |
| May 23, 2013 at 3:48 | comment | added | Carl Younger | Americans will usually write "an HTML document", where in the UK, it's normally written "a HTML document". Americans say 'aych', but Englishmen say 'haych', so it's entirely down to how you pronounce the word that follows. | |
| May 10, 2012 at 22:19 | comment | added | nohat | @Pacerier The first sound of the word "user" is a palatal approximant, which is a consonant, not a vowel. | |
| May 10, 2012 at 22:08 | comment | added | Pacerier | @nohat What do you mean by a vowel sound? user is pronounced as "you" + "zer", there is the "u" sound, so why is it not considered a vowel sound? | |
| Aug 19, 2010 at 2:45 | comment | added | Jonik | +1 for clearing up any confusion. That blog post is hilarious; full-on outrage against an imaginary feature of English grammar. :-P | |
| Aug 6, 2010 at 16:43 | comment | added | nohat | @itrekkie, it seems you answered your own question far better than I could have ;-) | |
| Aug 6, 2010 at 16:28 | comment | added | Dan | I thought you were going to say there is an urban legend that if you misuse an "an" you would shot by an arrow or something. Rather disappointed now. | |
| Aug 6, 2010 at 4:59 | comment | added | Charlie | But what's the reasoning behind this alternation? Is it syntactically motivated? Phonologically? | |
| Aug 6, 2010 at 4:40 | history | answered | nohat | CC BY-SA 2.5 |