English: A vs. An

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14 pointsingve4 comments

TLDR; English (like all languages) is crazy ... but one particular bit of craziness, the a/an split (and the exceptions to a simple understanding of it) isn't as crazy.

I was so primed to expect crazy I had to reread the article and your comment to notice "this bit of English isn't that crazy".

For those who won't read the article, either the word "a" or the word "an" is used before a word. Which is used depends on the first sound of the next word (not whether the next word starts with a vowel, as is commonly understood).

With this rule, only "129 of the 32,455 words in my list needed exceptions.", which is surprisingly regular.

That's how I've always understood the rule as a native speaker, even though I don't think it was ever taught (to me) in school growing up. It all depends on how the next word sounds.

I'm on my phone so maybe I missed something but I didn't even see that this was about exceptions to the rule? It seemed to be more about cases where the first sound couldn't be recovered orthographically. He special cased herb, for instance, because Americans inexplicably pronounce it "erb", or one and onerous because one is w and the other is on.

I can't think of a single true example to the real rule, it's an actually extraordinarily strong and simple rule as English goes.

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