Yet another Hacker News

English: A vs. An

82 points azhenley 2 hours ago 67 comments

dataflow 50 minutes ago | parent

Any verdict for "historic"?

beaned 42 minutes ago | parent

It depends on if you're speaking British or American English.

The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.

echelon 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

beaned 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

kelnos 25 minutes ago | parent

> This one seems to defy the rule.

No it doesn't. If I pronounce the "h", then using "an" sounds weird. If I don't, then "a" sounds weird.

> Journalists and films seem to use "an historic" with an American accent

Curious if you have a link to a video of this, I can't imagine it sounding correct.

dofm 31 minutes ago | parent

> The British pronounce it as "istory," so they use "an" before.

"The British" aren't monolithic and neither are our approaches to this.

I certainly don't say "it is an historic day" or "staying at an hotel" with the soft H, because to me, in the 21st century, it's an upper class affectation (I am from a middle class background and from the commuter belt 30 miles south of London).

I moved to a slightly posher place and I know people who do say "an historic day" (soft H) still but it's largely out of habit/age/schooling.

The BBC have stopped doing this, as a rule. The monarchy have moderated this aspect of their speech too — I am sure I remember the younger Prince Charles say "an historic day" with the soft H, but I am fairly sure he would now say "a historic day" with the hard H; he has been trying to progressively moderate his RP accent for the last 25 years or so.

ETA: clarification in reply to reply

beaned 28 minutes ago | parent

My point is that it's based on pronunciation. I didn't mean to offend you.

dofm 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

Planktonne 30 minutes ago | parent

The majority of British accents would pronounce the 'h'.

andsoitis 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

layer8 10 minutes ago | parent

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...

Narishma 7 minutes ago | parent

Depends on whether or not you pronounce the H.

kichimi 50 minutes ago | parent

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'.

post-it 47 minutes ago | parent

A/an herb, for example.

mc32 44 minutes ago | parent

/heitsh/ vs /eitsh/. I think it's mostly Irish with the former.

kelnos 24 minutes ago | parent

And Australian, I believe.

ajxs 7 minutes ago | parent

I'm Australian, and I say 'A Hotel', and 'A Herb'. Until very recently, I'd never heard anyone ever say it differently.

nephihaha 21 minutes ago | parent

"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.

nephihaha 23 minutes ago | parent

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.

isityettime 2 minutes ago | parent

Most Americans don't pronounce the "h" in "herb" or "herbal" afaict. We do usually pronounce it in people's names though, like "Herb".

nemonemo 40 minutes ago | parent

Maybe this could be used to track how some spoken language changes over time in a region or across regions.

abraxas 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

CoastalCoder 36 minutes ago | parent

Just curious, what is your native tongue?

nephihaha 17 minutes ago | parent

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?

fonheponho 15 minutes ago | parent

(Whether Hungarian qualifies as Finno-Ugric is up for debate, but Hungarian most definitely has determinate and indeterminate articles.)

fonheponho 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

devindotcom 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

NuclearPM 33 minutes ago | parent

Tongue?

scubbo 31 minutes ago | parent

In this sense, it's a synonym for "language". Usually used as "mother tongue" (meaning, the language one grew up speaking).

jampekka 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

arcbyte 33 minutes ago | parent

Just remmeber that "a" is short for "any". So do want the specific thing, or will any thing work?

moritzwarhier 31 minutes ago | parent

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.

tandr 20 minutes ago | parent

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.)

rawling 6 minutes ago | parent

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".

lcedp 15 minutes ago | parent

If only it were that simple. "I bought a car yesterday" -- Did I buy a specific car?

rimeice 9 minutes ago | parent

Yes you bought the car yesterday - it’s the now because it’s established in the conversation.

antonvs 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

AndrewDucker 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

lwansbrough 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

bethekidyouwant 24 minutes ago | parent

If there was only one castle then you would save the. For example our town has “the giant duck” (fictional fibreglass statue)

mauvehaus 17 minutes ago | parent

"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.

ahartmetz 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

Tade0 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

ccakes 5 minutes ago | parent

This reminds me of “en” vs “ett” in Swedish. No rules - just gotta know

throwawayk7h 36 minutes ago | parent

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?

devindotcom 33 minutes ago | parent

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.

rizonio 18 minutes ago | parent

with "the actual" I imagine you're also putting in a kind of intrusive "y" sound so it flows better into the vowel

CoastalCoder 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

stackghost 23 minutes ago | parent

> However, only some vowels

Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?

“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass

“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.

drnick1 16 minutes ago | parent

This is governed by the following word. "Thee" can also be used for emphasis anywhere.

weinzierl 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

mauvehaus 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

adzm 21 minutes ago | parent

And cherries were ceries from French, leading to the singular form cherry. Lots of neat little things like this.

zem 30 minutes ago | parent

"if words starts with hones" fails for "hones" itself; I suspect that should have been "honest" in the code.

nephihaha 27 minutes ago | parent

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.]

bethekidyouwant 22 minutes ago | parent

nephihaha 20 minutes ago | parent

Eh? I hear both of these on a regular basis. It is a phenomenon.

prometheus1992 21 minutes ago | parent

I can tell you did not use AN llm to write this post. Thanks.

mococa 14 minutes ago | parent

As a non speaker, I really hate this rule

hbn 11 minutes ago | parent

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."

moritzwarhier 9 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

mkatx 7 minutes ago | parent

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"

dearjames 5 minutes ago | parent

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?