English: A vs. An | Hacker News Reader

English: A vs. An

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365 pointsazhenley529 comments

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.

> The further back you go in Indo-European languages, they don't have articles.

Heh, while we're discussing English, this annoys me.

"The further back you go" is a continuum, the effect you describe should be too.

> The further back you go, the fewer Indo-European languages have articles.

Or match a discontinuity with a discontinuity.

> If you go back beyond a certain point, Indo-European languages don't have articles.

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.

> "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.)

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.

Even more common with "the". "They are THE vendors", which is either to say that those are definitely the vendors referred to elsewhere, or that they represent the archetype of vendors (whatever that is). Language is weird.

Yeah, definitely inflection-based. A more relaxed one would indicate "a small amount", which for the opposite could be directly swapped with "many".

And doesn't "some vendors they are" mean the opposite?

Yes, unless Yoda you are.

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.

No, some is not an indefinite article, it is a quantifier word, just like "few" or "many". This is most easily visible in the fact that you can say "A: How many pears should I buy? B: Just buy some." - which would not be possible for an article, which must always be attached to a noun (you would never answer "Just buy a" in response to that question).

> No, some is not an indefinite article, it is a quantifier word, just like "few" or "many".

Quantifier words and articles are all the same part of speech. It's still true that the plural of a(n) is some.

There are other ways to use some - for example, it can be singular too - but that doesn't affect the question.

Articles and quantifiers are different parts of speech in most grammars. Articles are specifically different in having no independent meaning, more similar to prepositions than to adjectives (which some is classified as in its use as a quantifier that we were discussing here).

English just doesn't have an indefinite plural article. This is not actually that uncommon - German has the same property, for example.

Interestingly, when you speak about a category as a whole, in English, you use the null article (“cats meow” or “I like apples”), whereas in French, you would use the definite article (« les chats miaulent », « j’aime les pommes »).

«cats» in «cats meow» and «apples» in «I like apples» are not categories, they are bare plural noun phrases with generic reference. They refer generically to members of the relevant class, rather than naming the class itself.

Both are count nouns, and, in English, a plural count noun takes the null article when it is used with generic or non-specific indefinite reference rather than to denote a contextually identifiable set.

However, in

  Cat is divided into numerous breeds.

  Cat excludes animals such as dogs and foxes.

  Apple excludes such fruits as pears and peaches.

  Apple contains numerous cultivated varieties.

«cat» and «apple» are categories.

“Cats meow” is “about” the whole of what makes up the category as opposed to parts of it. I thought it quite clear that that’s what I meant. If I ask you “could you please tell me more about Barack Obama?”, I would expect you to tell me about the person that the name “Barack Obama” refers to, not about the name “Barack Obama”.

> “Cats meow” is “about” the whole of what makes up the category as opposed to parts of it.

No. That is, at best, a highly informal proposition and, at worst, a frivolous disposition masquerading as a definition of «category».

Bare plurals can have generic or kind-related interpretations (the one you refer to as «category»); they do not entail reference to every individual member of the class: a mute cat can't meow, and a rotten apple is unlikely to be liked.

The Obama analogy illustrates reference vs mention, but that distinction is orthogonal to the actual semantic disagreement.

Which itself is completely orthogonal to the point I was making. You can imagine I said “dinosaurs are extinct” and « les dinosaures ont disparu » if that makes you feel better.

> That is, at best, a highly informal proposition

That’s what it was meant as, yes, since you seemed to be misinterpreting what I was getting at (contents of the category as opposed to meta-commentary about the categorisation). The goal was to clarify, not to publish to an academic journal.

> Bare plurals can have generic or kind-related interpretations (the one you refer to as «category»); they do not entail reference to every individual member of the class: a mute cat can't meow, and a rotten apple is unlikely to be liked.

Irrelevant.

Since categories have been invoked, we are discussing semantics.

«As a whole» leaves unclear whether your example means the kind itself, its members generally or every member without exception as they are three distinct interpretations. This is what I have remarked on.

«Cats meow» attributes characteristic behaviour to cats generally.

«Dinosaurs are extinct» attributes a property to a kind, making it a better example supporting kind reference.

The latter also establishes that English bare plurals can denote kinds. Their grammatical form does not guarantee that interpretation: «cats entered the dumpster» concerns individual cats on a particular occasion.

I never said it guarantees it. I said that when you discuss entire categories, you use one article in English and another in French, along with examples, and it is applicable to all three interpretations, ergo the distinction is immaterial. Whether it is factual to apply those statements to every single member is completely beside the point.

Also,

> The Obama analogy illustrates reference vs mention, but that distinction is orthogonal to the actual semantic disagreement.

It’s orthogonal to what you have shifted your argument to, but in the context of your original objection, I think it was an apt analogy.

Is French different? Il est un médecin? Il est médecin? Ils sont médecins sounds fine.

Nope, it's basically as in spanish:

> Il est un médecin?

Nope that's bogus french: you say "il est médecin". But you can say: "c'est un médecin".

> That's bogus

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.

> you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.

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.

> 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.

Good point!

I think it probably just boils down to whether the word is functionally necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence and how the language evolved...

For example, in French you don't usually pronounce the "s" at the end of a plural noun and lots of singular nouns end in "s", so the articles become necessary for determining if you mean plural or singular. In English you pronounce the "s" clearly and very few singular words end in "s", so you just don't need the article to distinguish anything, it becomes functionally redundant.

There are some nouns that are always plurals e.g. "scissors" or "pants", and those things still arguably need indefinite/definite distinction, right? Actually no, the very use of plain "scissors" instead of "*a scissors" demonstrates very well the redundancy of the indefinite article, but let's pretend.

That's just an oddity due to nominally singular items having plural names.

"*a scissors/pants" is correctly "a pair of scissors/pants" and you still use the definite "the scissors/pants"

So "get me scissors" is a bit odd but works only because the singular item happens to have a plural name.

Again, e.g. Bulgarian uses едни ("ones") as essentially plural indefinite article, and for genuinely plural things too. It's not nearly as pervasive as the English usage (the null article is used in most cases), but it exists. While in English you could reply to "Where are you going?" with "To hang out with some friends" ('it doesn't really matter to you which ones exactly'), in Bulgarian that "some" would be translated as "едни", not "няколко" or "някои" (technically, you could use that last one, but the meaning would be that you're yourself not sure with whom exactly you're going to hang out there).

This is not a good explanation, because you could just as well say "I have cat and two dogs". The fact remains that "a cat", "cat", and "the cat" (and "one cat") all have separate meanings; while for plural, you only have "cats" and "the cats".

I can't answer the why question, but out of all Germanic languages, only Faroese has retained the plural indefinite article, although its use is restricted to nouns that 1) only occur in the plural and 2) indicate «a pair/set of», e.g.:

  einar buksur (feminine plural) – a pair of pants

  einir skógvar (masculine plural) – a pair of shoes

Other than that, Germanic languages typically do not have a plural form of the indefinite article.

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.

Is it possible that after the JFK speech and exposure to English this mode of using 'ein' actually became more acceptable? If not I wonder what drove this story.

I think it's much more likely this story was spread by native English speakers who learned German as a second language in school. It has all the hallmarks of a teacher's pedantry to me.

That said, blunders do occasionally happen even at this level. During Bill Clinton's visit in Romania (the first time a US president visited the country after the Revolution), he said in a huge public speech that the American people stands shoulder to shoulder with the Romanians - which the translator for the public broadcast translated as "șold la șold", which sounds similar, but means "hip to hip" (the correct translation, which is also a literal translation as the expression exists in Romanian as well, is "umăr la umăr").

Wikipedia has a lengthy section about this 'gaffe', including the likely origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner#Urban_leg...

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

Both may be correct, but one is more prevalent. And in English, the article is always required.

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.

* 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”

I think you missed the joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_pastry

> A Danish pastry (sometimes shortened to Danish)

> Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."

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.

Your newsletter: How does one subscribe?

Alas there is none but I can recommend the Lexicon Valley podcast.

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.

> Similarities between languages

If they are substantial instead of superficial.

> This comment just explains ... idiom in terms of

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"?

> you would not place an "a" in front

That is because 'tall' and 'married' are adjectives. So: "a tall fellow, a married man, and a doctor in medicine".

> Are you feeling through memory or through logic?

This feels (feeels, before you ask again) like begging the question. We're talking about a natural language here, not a programming language. It has rules but they evolved through natural usage, and those rules are flexible ("because internet"), and there's plenty of technically correct but wrong feeling constructions ("bad big wolf").

Like, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" will sound like the raving of a madman regardless of the fact that it's technically valid.

> Commander, General, Loyal Servant, Father to a murdered son.

I mostly think that that's a weird collection of things to all be at once to a murdered son.

"Brothers, sisters, comrades, and also people who are not my relatives or acquaintances. Today is a sad day..."

> I mostly think that that's a weird collection of things to all be at once to a murdered son

Were you joking, or you never heard it? «My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife». I have not seen the movie yet I know the quote...

> feels

Feelings can have wrong roots and be corrected by better consideration.

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.

“He is President” works when it’s clear which position you’re referring to.

“He is doctor” sounds wrong because there’s rarely just one doctor.

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.

But he is totally right Spanish is more consistent in that respect, because it has a plural article. You can say "son unos perros" as well when you put that sentence in plural.

Of course, that doesn't say anything about the languages in general, there are also things where Spanish is less consistent. E.g. why do we say "la película es buena" but "el día está bueno"? I'm a native Spanish speaker and when asked by foreigners about a rule that would explain that, I've never been able to come up with one.

I'm learning Chinese and my feeling is that it's more consistent than both Spanish and English, things actually tend to make a lot of sense in Chinese. A pity that between the tones and the characters, it's much harder to learn than either of them.

>why do we say "la película es buena" but "el día está bueno"?

I don't know if I'm quite qualified to lecture you on your mother tongue, but AFAIR that's because one is an unchangeable inherent quality (of the movie), and the other one is a temporary condition (of the weather).

As a learner, I find Spanish/Castellano to be quite consistent, actually.

It's normal that one's native language's quirks tend to be very difficult to explain, because you learned them intuitively. E.g. I was surprised to learn from conversations that a lot of Spanish speakers seem to have never heard what the subjuntivo is, and being told, couldn't explain for the life of them why they use it all the time.

But the "rule" you mention has at least one exception: death is clearly not a temporary condition, but a dead person "está muerta" y no "es muerta"

I don't really see that as an exception or contradiction, rather a side effect of my poor way of communicating it. This "rule" isn't meant to be exhaustive, but is a mnemonic device for a more complex set of rules that spans one or more pages in a textbook. It works in my head. ;)

The way I see it, a dead person used to be alive before "changing state": in that sense it's a "condition", even if it's not exactly temporary. The difference between ser and estar stems from the inherence of a quality.

I've seen it put in English as: ser is about what something or someone is, estar is used for the how. (You can say: Es un muerto. Because that's what he is. But: Está muerto. He was alive.)

Dato curioso: supuestamente en España se dice "estar casado", en Latinoamerica es "ser casado". Make of that what you will...

il est docteur

c'est un docteur

See also "he's in hospital" and "he's in the hospital" in British and American English.

> 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.

They were called articles by analogy to other languages. Determiners is too broad a class, encompassing too many different words with clearly different roles. It happens that in English articles and other determiners such as possessives or demonstratives are exclusive, so this is harder to see.

But in other languages, a noun can have both an article and a possessive, or both an article and a demonstrative. For example, in Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, you don't say "my dog", you say "il mio cane" / "o meu cão" / "câine-le* meu". In Romanian you even have to say "câine-le* ăla" for "that dog".

English also makes it hard to tell different word classes apart because it has very little variance in words. In other languages, articles have to agree with their nouns in different ways from possessives and/or demonstratives. For example, in German the possessive pronoun has to agree with both the gender of the noun it describes and that of the noun it replaces - "his dog, her dog, his cat, her cat" become "sein Hund, ihr Hund, seine Katze, ihre Katze", whereas of course the definite article only agrees with the gender of the noun it attaches to. Demonstratives in German don't agree with the noun in gender at all.

Also, quantifiers like "some", "none", "a few" etc are different from the above in that they can be used in more ways than just determiners. They can appear standalone as the subject of a phrase, for example, which articles and possessives can't.

* note that standard spelling is "câinele", which is "câine" + the definite article "-le", since definite articles become noun suffixes in Romanian.

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.

> He is tall, he is smart, he is (a) doctor.

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?"

I always thought that "some" was technically an article (the plural form of "a"/"an") but I hadn't considered how plurals weren't used in phrases like that.

One thing I did notice about strangeness in English articles is how British English seems to use definite articles in places where American English uses indefinite ones. Back when reading Murder on the Orient Express in school, I remember finding it amusing how one character mentioned that he had "the toothache", which as an American to me sounded like he was saying there's only one toothache in the world that just travels around to me or something.

Articles are weird. My very inexperienced impression is that maybe the only weirder thing is how inconsistently prepositions map to each other between languages, which never seems to be 1:1. Sometimes there's even variation within a language; I always grew up saying "by accident", so it sounds wrong to me when I hear someone say "on accident" but I also realize there's no objectively more correct phrasing.

> the toothache

As a native of England, “he had the toothache” sounds odd to too. I would say “he had a toothache” or just “he had toothache”. Though we aren't entirely consistent: “he had flu”, “he had the flu”, are both fine. “he had a flu” would normally sound wrong (though is technically correct, there are many flu viruses) but “he had a cold” is always fine. “he had the cold” only works in a context where it would be understood as a shorthand for something like “he had the cold that was going around”.

> I always grew up saying "by accident", so it sounds wrong to me when I hear someone say "on accident" but I also realize there's no objectively more correct phrasing.

If speaking actual English rather than a North American variant, “by accident” is objectively the correct phrasing. I'm not aware of any common accent from England in which “on accident” is used.

I just double checked and it's exactly what I remembered; the detective was interviewing someone explicitly described as being English (who in the same conversation said they had never been to America): https://esl-bits.eu/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks/The%20Or...

> “I went to bed, sir, but I didn’t sleep.”

> “Why didn’t you sleep?”

> “I had the toothache, sir.”

I'm inclined to trust Agatha Christie to have accurately reflected speech patterns that someone from England at least with a certain social status at a given point in time. Maybe it's not common anymore, or it used to be common in America as well back in the day.

> If speaking actual English rather than a North American variant

At this point you've at least disagreed with Agatha Christie about what English from someone from England sounds like, and now you're claiming that English as spoken by far more people than in England isn't "actual" English, so it's not clear to me that taking what you're saying at face value is worthwhile. It honestly seems like you have a bit of an inflated sense of authority about the language because the name of it happens to have originated with where you're from to the point where you're dismissive of anything other than your own direct knowledge, even when it's from a world-renowned author who has the same regional source of authority as you.

And you sir, appear to have taken my view rather personally.

There is nothing wrong with American English, but it is American English: English as commonly spoken in America. Just as Australian English is Australian English, and so forth. I was pointing out that in the former what you (a speaker of the latter) found strange would also not sound correct.

> I'm inclined to trust Agatha Christie to have accurately reflected speech patterns that someone from England at least with a certain social status at a given point in time.

Social status and point in time are doing a lot of work there. I don't know the character being discussed at all, it could also be that she intended to give him a slightly out-of-place mode of speech. In any case, you'd need more than one example to suggest the form is/was commonly considered correct. Writers, even those of her standing, do make mistakes, and if it wasn't deliberate then editing it after initial publication was not as practical back then as it might be today.

> spoken by far more people than in England isn't "actual" English

It is a form of English. American English. You can call what I speak British English if you like (avoid English English - that will offend people from other parts of the isles/union, who each maintain a linguistic history which predates them being part of the larger entity) and no one will be offended. But claiming the language for your own just because there are more of you, is somewhat tasteless in a “Lake America” way. There are more Spanish speakers in South America than mainland Spain, but they don't take exception to the distinction being drawn between Spanish and Latin American Spanish, where the variants have diverged.

> And you sir, appear to have taken my view rather personally.

Yes, I find it somewhat offensive when people act smug about their specific form of language because it's so heavily tainted by attempts to claim cultural superiority (not just between different countries, but often between subcultures in the same area). Saying that you speak "actual" English and I don't and then clutching your pearls at the fact that I point out it's a pretty terrible thing to say is just passive-aggressive. Being formal and pretending that you were being polite about it doesn't make it less rude.

> Social status and point in time are doing a lot of work there. I don't know the character being discussed at all, it could also be that she intended to give him a slightly out-of-place mode of speech. In any case, you'd need more than one example to suggest the form is/was commonly considered correct. Writers, even those of her standing, do make mistakes, and if it wasn't deliberate then editing it after initial publication was not as practical back then as it might be today.

Sure, I don't disagree with that. I don't see why you had to go out of your way to passive-aggressively insult other cultures than your own to make that point though.

> It is a form of English. American English. You can call what I speak British English if you like (avoid English English - that will offend people from other parts of the isles/union, who each maintain a linguistic history which predates them being part of the larger entity) and no one will be offended. But claiming the language for your own just because there are more of you, is somewhat tasteless in a “Lake America” way. There are more Spanish speakers in South America than mainland Spain, but they don't take exception to the distinction being drawn between Spanish and Latin American Spanish, where the variants have diverged.

Again, you said the words "actual English". That's rude. No amount of flowery language changes that. You're going out of your way to try to make it seem like I was overreacting to an incidental word choice, and that's not a premise I'm ever going to accept.

"He has toothache" or "he has a toothache" are both correct (and mean exactly the same thing), but "he has the toothache" is just wrong, at least in modern English (in the sense that no native speaker would say that)

We don't say "the toothache" but we do say eg. "the measles". So I think it's more an older way of talking than a Britishism.

As for "on accident" I've always assumed this was just a mistake from childhood, kids equating it with "on purpose" and never being corrected. A bit of a bone apple tea.

However I get your point, I used to correct an Indian colleague when he would say expressions a bit wrong, until I gave up and realized it had just become part of his local dialect in the region he was from. (Eg. "I have to go pick my kid" instead of "pick up my kid" which made me laugh at first and then drove me a bit crazy because he would consistently keep saying it.) At some point these things cross a line and become somehow "correct" again, that's just language for you.

A native English speakers we are in a particular spot where we have to just accept that the majority of the world is going to be speaking our language non natively, and that is fine once you get used to it.

The other way around, Spanish uses the definite article where English would not:

• Tengo los ojos azules -> I have blue eyes (not I have the blue eyes)

• Juego el tenis -> I play tennis (not I play the tennis)

Though as with the indefinite article, at least there is no discrepancy between single/plural. In part it is necessary because there are some words that don't vary their spelling in different genders but do have different meaning:

• la papa -> the potato, el papa -> the pope (also el papá -> the dad)

• la capital -> the capital (as in city), el capital -> the capital (as in money)

• la corte -> the court, el corte -> the cut

[I had to look those up to check, I'd have had cut/court back-to-front otherwise!]

Another thing that doesn't exist in English is an equivalent to the “personal a”: vi a Fred -> I saw Fred, vi cuatro gatos -> I saw four cats (both languages use a definite or indefinite article for a single non-personal subject: vi un gato / vi el gato -> I saw a cat / I saw the cat). I suppose it could be said that Spanish is more consistent here too: there is always something in that position for simple forms, be it a count, an article, or a. I say “for simple forms” as there is nothing there for thing like “vi oscuridad en sus ojos” -> I saw darkness in his/her eyes (though in both languages either definite or indefinite article would also work but might suggest different emphasis: I saw a darkness in… / I saw the darkness in…).

Something that Spanish has, that your "vi a Fred" example reminded me of is that when the direct object of a sentence is a person, you use "a": "vi a Fred", "escuché a mi mamá". Unlike unhuman objects: "vi el carro", "escuché un ruido".

That is exactly what I referred to: the personal “a”. Used when referring to a person.

At least in Chile, we say "juego tenis", or maybe "juego al tenis" ('al' being the contraction of 'a' and 'el', i.e. 'to the'), but not "juego el tenis" (that sounds weird)

interestingly there is "ellos son unos payasos" = they are clowns: a judgement, not a statement about their employment

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.

> 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).

[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.”

Yes, exactly the example I put in ("the one") — thanks for sharing it and showing it might not even be 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.

One could imagine a very stressful weekend (two evenings), one of which was “the rough evening” and the other was “the nice evening”.

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.

>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to.

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.

Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun has definiteness.

To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".

I am agreeing with you that "the" in "I went to the store" does not necessarily imply any specific instance of the noun, and is a grammatically distinct use of the word.

Some of the statements (by other people) in this conversation are wrong, based on applying a school-style oversimplified explanation that doesn't really match English usage.

Usually, the mall, the store, the gas station in a story are habitual known places for the people telling you these stories, and they are implying that. In other cases, it is being used as an idiom that imply something habitual, common, run of the mill.

Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.

I see this as consistent with other replies stating that The is something specific in a group, and A is an indeterminant one of many.

How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".

That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.

> 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.

Well, that would work for many uses of the, but it's definitely not a correct explanation here. If I have no idea where the bank is, I'll still describe myself as going to "the bank". I could tell you that "I'm going to the bank", go out and get in my car, and then look up where a convenient bank is. This has to be viewed as idiomatic, or as "the bank" being an abstract task-based location rather than a concrete physical location.

"Do you have any kids ?"

"I have the son" sounds odd, even if there is only 1 son on your mind.

This is because "a"/"an" mean "one". The stress generally is on it meaning "[any] one", but in your example "a" is used for its numerical meaning instead; the sentences "I have a son" and "I have one son" are interchangeable in this instance.

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?

Yes.

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.)

You can use "the" in the original sentence just fine if the pool had been established earlier, like with planning a pool party. Then the pool is the pool that you'd be using, and not simply a pool that will be found at some point in the future.

That isn't a reference to a specific pool. It's say that our (specific) house has the property of having a pool.

Yeah, this is the sort of nuance that drives nonnative speakers insane.

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 believe it can be even simpler.

"Chocolate ice-cream is the best" is very clearly not an (attempt at) objective statement and needs no qualifiers. Only if the reader really wants to be malicious, they can question even that too: what do you base that on? how many ice-cream types have you tried? is there a study confirming preferred taste among a large population? is it cultural and has that been tested? ...

"In my opinion, based on roughly 60 ice-cream flavors I have tried in my life, and having tried chocolate flavor in at least 50 different places, I find that the taste of chocolate ice-cream on average is the best tasting ice-cream regardless of my mood, fullness or place of production and variety of 'chocolate' used" makes for a very boring conversation — except sometimes when you are making a go at it :)

"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.

A lot of these are historical leftovers.

the doctor, the cinema, the dentist, etc imply there's one family connection you use, or it's the local place everybody uses. "The" specifies "the one" everybody uses.

I'm guessing saying 'a' doctor would've looked at the role as an abstract concept. "To be a doctor would be wonderful" vs "to be the doctor would be wonderful".

I guess it's language clinging on to a sense of community.

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.

> there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles

Well, on second thought ...

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."

I see this as consistent. When you say "I play the piano" you are really saying, "There are many instruments – banjo, trumpet, clarinet, and piano. I play the piano". Saying "I play a piano" is also correct. But the inference is that you are referring to one particular piano.

In the sentence "There is a piano in the lobby" you are saying "There are many objects in the lobby. Among them is a piano, one of many in the world".

But it's still where the generic, simplistic application of the rule of "the for distinct, a for generic" fails.

When "you can play the piano", you can play any piano. When "there is a piano in the lobby", it's distinctively a very specific one.

So I would go on a limb and claim: whether you use the or a is also philosophical in nature :)

Instruments are interesting when it comes to articles. I'm wondering if it's a leftover for when people would play in orchestras.

> What do you play (in the orchestra)?

> I play the piano (in the orchestra).

Using 'the' here feels quite formal, as if you belong to something, or it's a career choice.

> Play any instruments?

> ah, I play guitar (casually)

> Yes, I play the guitar (for a band, or at least I larp as doing so)

When it comes to 'a/an', we should assume that there's an element of randomness, or irrelevance as to which one precisely.

> What you doing tonight? Playing guitar

> What you doing tonight? Playing a guitar

> What you doing tonight? Playing the guitar.

The second option doesn't sound natural interestingly, as 'tonight' in the question implies there's a plan. Playing 'an' instrument, therefore, comes off as more spontaneous; playing 'any' instrument which just happens to be there.

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.

> 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.

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".

> Peppa Pig is the shit

I can't resist linking this bit of linguistic humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo

A Japanese struggling to learn English asked me "What means... 'asshole'?"

While I struggled to answer, he graphically gestured, and I agreed.

"But... also means... 'friend'?"

Oh. Big cultural difference. I had to explain how US males used insults as a proxy for affectionate gestures, to someone who uneasily spoke English.

He was not fully convinced, I think.

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 ).

> It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.

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.

> [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.

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"?

It seems like a shortening of "all of the cases", but I'm not a native speaker.

We frequently use definite articles with plurals. It simply identifies a bounded or known set.

* I understand all languages. -- unbounded set, applies to every language, everywhere

* I understand all the languages. -- bounded set, applies to a known set of languages, i.e. specifically those languages which are supported by a particular program

To be fair, I think "all cases" in this situation is also acceptable.

To me, as non-native, it seems that it may be because the idea [1] of "cases" was already introduced. So, at the start of a conversation you would say:

- The rules of a/the are simple.

- Not really, if you think so, then you haven't considered _all cases_. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...]

but:

- The rules of a/the are simple.

- Not really. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...] If you think the rules are simple, then you haven't considered _all the cases_.

[1] but take what I write with a big grain of salt, I can't explain why I wrote "the idea" or "the start" and I'm not 100% sure if that's correct :)

- For "the idea" and "the start", your usage is correct and changing it would be incorrect.

- I don't think the explanation of "all cases" vs "all the cases" fully works. I agree with other commenters that in this example, either phrase might be used. (Whether the sentences comes after a point-by-point discussion or before.)

To me, the version without the has a less natural feeling. You might describe it as more formal, or more stilted, or more abrupt, but the main point is that it's going to be somewhat dispreferred. There isn't necessarily a reason for the preference to tilt one way or the other.

> 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."

Your description is incomplete. I agree that "I'm at school" carries at least a strong implication that you are a student at that school, but it also carries the denotation that the school is where you are currently physically located. If you want to specify that you are currently a student without claiming that you're currently on the premises, you would need to say "I'm in school", though that particular expression (a) doesn't specify which school you attend, and (b) can't be altered to provide that information (which is to say, you can't replace "school" with the name of a school). To get there, you need to change the verb; you can say "I attend Florida State", at which point the stative inflection on attend makes it clear that you aren't discussing your current physical location.

The hospital example is pretty much the same. Being "in the hospital" is analogous to being "in school", a fact about your current status rather than your current location. For your location you'd want to use "at", which doesn't have the same weird thing going on in "at the hospital" that it does in "at school".

> The hospital example is pretty much the same. Being "in the hospital" is analogous to being "in school",

No. To be "in hospital" or to go "to hospital" means that you are a patient. To be "in the hospital" describes only location.

> Your description is incomplete

Your analysis is fine, but does not contradict my comment and moreover is irrelevant to the present discussion, which pertains to the subtle use of articles in English.

> No. To be "in hospital" or to go "to hospital" means that you are a patient. To be "in the hospital" describes only location.

>>> in UK English, not so much American English

---

> Your analysis is fine, but does not contradict my comment and moreover is irrelevant to the present discussion, which pertains to the subtle use of articles in English.

As you can see from the dialectal difference you've already described, what you're talking about isn't really related to "the subtle use of articles in English". American English and British English agree on how their articles are used. Where they agree on "in school" and disagree on "in hospital", you can recognize that usage in those phrases, rather than revealing some kind of subtle point about how the is used in nearly-identical contexts, is determined arbitrarily.

> you can recognize that usage in those phrases, rather than revealing some kind of subtle point about how the is used in nearly-identical contexts, is determined arbitrarily.

I wasn't aware that I was making a "subtle" point. I was joint showing that the use of articles in English is complex and hard-to-predict for non-native speakers, in contradiction to the claim (paraphrased) that "Just use the for things that are definite, duh!" Your observation that article use varies between dialects of the same language strengthens my point, insofar as encountering inconsistent use makes learning the language even harder.

> is determined arbitrarily.

I don't know what you're trying to say here. Languages vary systematically over time. Just because two different dialects, or two different languages, do things in different ways doesn't mean that those changes were arrived at arbitrarily.

> 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

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.

> people provide post-hoc justifications for language features that often have no essential rhyme or reason.

Nah. English articles make sense, they're just usually unnecessary, and languages can often do without the information they add (or they reduce ambiguity in other ways.) English articles certainly reduce the context necessary to understand an isolated sentence.

In Spanish, for example, knowing the subject of the conversation or even knowing what's going on in the surroundings of the speaker might be necessary to understand a subjunctive. In English, hearing a definite article will tell you that you've missed something if you don't know what it refers to; hearing an indefinite one will assure you that you haven't. Hearing an article at all will assure you that the noun isn't being verbed (if it's not obvious.) It's impossible to tell what some Spanish sentences mean in isolation, because you don't know who would do, could do, should do, or was doing the thing. Means nothing in normal conversation. Koreans are like "how do you even know how old they were?" Quechua are like "how do you even know how they found out?"

There's a good reason for everything in language, because if we don't need it, it will just get dropped. The obvious purpose of a thing might not be the reason that it is necessary, though. It may plug an ambiguity hole left by other parts of the language. It may be necessary socially/religiously. It may just reduce to a tolerable level the amount of thinking one has to do before beginning to speak.

> It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know.

Definitely true, but this is a bad example. English adjective order is the really good example that people usually cite. We don't even know that we're doing it. Also all of our weird grammatical tones, and our strong word/phrase -initial stress. Shifting that stuff changes meanings completely, everybody understands, nobody notices. Except people coming from tonal languages, trying their best not to sound like robots or broken tape recorders.

The "I don't know" noise, "[note]mmm[higher note]MMM[middle note]mmm," and the other weird sing songy grunts we do that are words. Our crazy vowels. The fact that the word "tests" is a voiced click and two hisses.

And that's not even getting into politeness - and the difference between modulating politeness and indexing politeness. English speakers modulate. Speakers of many Asian languages index. We change forms of address as a way to express how we currently feel about someone, whereas when a Korean person starts dropping honorifics, it almost means they don't even think you're human.

I'd add an example I basically never see discussed about English (in common discussions, it is otherwise very well studied in phonetic linguistics, and mentioned in dictionaries) - weak and strong forms - how sentence stress is indicated by shifting vowels around. For example, the word "the" is pronounced as either ðə or ði, two quite different vowels, depending solely on whether it has topic-level stress ("the question is" vs "this is the question"). Similarly, "a" is either ə or eɪ, again depending on topical stress.

I believe this is quite uncommon in European languages (a system where the same word is pronounced with different sounds based on the topic level stress assigned to it, not on basic prosody/word sequence/etc). Apparently Dutch has a similar system.

> 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.

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:

> Brent: Ah, the tax man.

> Drey: A tax man.

> Brent: Pardon?

> Drey: I'm not the tax man, I'm a tax man. Saying the tax man is just a little dehumanizing, thank you very much.

[…]

> Brent: A tax man. And whatever you, don't call him "the tax man." Call him "a tax man" or he kinda goes squirrelly on ya.

> Wanda: Some people are sensitive about article use.

> Brent: About what?

> Wanda: Proper article use. "A" or "an" are indefinite articles. "The" is a definite article. In fact, some people say "the" is "the" definite article.

[…]

> Hank: I know what I'm doing. We get the tax man...

> Brent: A tax man.

> Wanda: Actually, in this case you can say "the" tax man, because you're referring to a particular person.

[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.

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.

> 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

https://www.rae.es/espanol-al-dia/el-agua-esta-agua-mucha-ag...

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 in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.

Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.

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

Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.

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”

Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’.

Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.

But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”

Sounds logical; I'd like such a system.

Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better

Yep. Languages would be much better if they followed an RFC process.

Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get:

> Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet.

Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.

English has these options, too.

> “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.”

'The former was delighted to meet the latter.'

There's also other languages which have different ways to class nouns. Have a look at eg Chinese.

> I am really confused as to how it ever developed

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.

My language has male/female/neuter in singular and male-person/everything-else in plural (e.g. singular dog is male and declines like boy, but plural dogs is non-male-person and declines like girls).

It used to have dual number, now it's just singular and plural. There are, however, exactly three words that use the dual number rules for its plural, even for N>2: hands, eyes and ears.

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

> I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split

Well, as I understand, the actual animate/inanimate split was there at least 10 000 years ago (or more)! And the language has gradually changed over the years until it's barely recognizable. For half of the period that passed we didn't even have written languages, and can only approximately deduce the words by tracing their common origins in related languages.

See how modern English has changed in 500 years from the earlier Middle English — as a non-native English speaker, I can barely recognize a few things, and it's otherwise completely unintelligible for me. Now multiply that change by at least 20x.

So how words are split between genders in modern languages - has very little relation to how they were before. For example, in modern Spanish, masculine gender is a fusion of Latin masculine and neuter genders. So technically if we say that in Classical Latin there was still a statistically significant animate/inanimate split between masculine and neuter genders - nowadays it's the same single gender in Spanish.

This would explain why German singular feminine and plural everything use the same article (in most cases).

> plural inanimate abstract words ... "feminine"

A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations, languages, and complex machines (especially ships). While usually people ascribe the pronoun "it" to these, occasionally they use a gendered pronoun, and if so, it's always "she", never "he". Two churches or organizations or even ideas might be "sisters" or in a "mother/daughter" relationship. The common theme through all these examples is plurality and abstractness.

Decades ago I was at a party where some people were gathered around a rather nice table, and someone said "This is a lovely table". A french person said (in English) "Yes, she is, isn't she".

It's the first and only time I've had the sense of what it probably sounds like to speakers of gendered languages when an English (or other) speaker gets the gender wrong.

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.

> nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender

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...

In (European) Portuguese some people (I've seen this more in older people) use feminine for hamburgers (like in Spanish, afaik), but most people use masculine. I guess it would make sense to be feminine because it's a sandwich, and sandwich is feminine.

In Russian it's quite common too. Car can be feminine (машина), masculine (авто/автомобиль), and neuter (транспортное средство).

And different car brands usually have their own gender too: for example Mercedes is usually masculine even though named after founder's daughter, and Honda is isually feminine.

The brand gender is really interesting. We will usually use the gender of the type of vehicle. So for saying "My Honda" we will use masculine if it's a car (O meu [carro] Honda), but feminine if it's a van (A minha [carrinha] Honda).

As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, today I learnt that "sanduíche" is feminine in Portugal. I had no idea!

And I learned that it's masculine in Brazil! :)

> As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex

Said every native speaker I suppose.

Why abridge (and misrepresent) my quote?

>it's not complex if you're a native speaker

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.

Oh it seems you took it personally, whereas I mentioned "every native speaker". My intention was not to rule you, just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

I didn't read it as something being taken personally, just as a clarification. A misquote is a misquote no matter whose it was

> My intention was [...] just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

Fwiw, that was not at all clear to me from a sarcastic few words

No sarcasm intended, I was being literal. Me and my wife have different mother tongues. What's natural to her isn't to me and vice versa and we keep telling each other that it's easy.

Huh, I'm in the same situation but not sure I've ever considered an aspect of my language easy just because I speak it, and my partner's country is known for saying "deutsche sprache, schwere sprache" (german language, difficult language) so the entire country seems to realise it. I'll poke fun at "we only have like half the genders you do" but it's always clearly in jest; from learning a language as an adult myself the difficulty is very clear. Interesting to hear the different perspective

s/rule/rile/g

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?

Strictly speaking there's no causality in either direction. A word's gender determines what it takes for other words to agree with it, while the form of the word itself can be anything. A word can always be irregular.

But not every word can be irregular. Mostly the words that belong to a gender will match a set of patterns, and the words belonging to another gender will match a different set of patterns. If you're lucky, you can learn a word from some usage that makes its gender explicit (and for irregular words, this is the only way you can learn about their irregularity). But often all you have to go on is the word, and in that case, when you want to use it, you have to make a choice. You'll do that based on the form of the word.

-----

If you want some examples of how gender irregularity in nouns works, here are a few different phenomena in Latin:

- An adjective in the first/second declensions has masculine (singular) endings -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō, -e and feminine endings -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -a. If you see one of these endings, and you know the adjective is first/second declension¹, then you've fully specified the gender of the adjective. There are no exceptions.

- First and second declension nouns mostly follow this pattern. Lana means wool and, as the -a suffix would lead you to expect, it's feminine. Campus means field as, as the -us suffix would lead you to expect, it's masculine. What this means is that "white wool" is lana alba and "a white field" is campus albus.

- Trees are weird. They are second declension (or sometimes fourth; pretend that's not true), appearing to be masculine, but instead they're feminine. So you'd have pinus alba, a white pine tree, or quercus alba, a white oak tree.

- There's a short list of profession terms that are first declension, appearing to be feminine, but that are nevertheless masculine. So it'd be agricola albus, a white farmer, or nauta albus, a white sailor.

- What about corpus? Well, it's neuter. Corpus album, a white body. Corpus is a third declension noun, and the third declension works completely differently. The apparent -us ending is misleading; the root of this noun is actually corpor- and the suffixes, of course, belong to the third declension.

- What do you do if you run into a word you don't know how to deal with? Pretend it's normal. Manus is a Latin word that means "hand"; it appears to be masculine, but it's feminine. It turns out that referring to hands is common enough that Spanish speakers today still remember that this masculine-looking word, now mano, is actually feminine. But we may compare Biblia, which is feminine in Spanish today despite the fact that in Latin it was neuter. It's feminine now because of that -a ending.

¹ That isn't actually true; the neuter suffixes are mostly just masculine suffixes except for one that is feminine. There are no distinctive second-declension neuter suffixes. But the suffixes by themselves are sufficient to distinguish masculine gender from feminine.

> “a árvore”

I'm glad that Portuguese doesn't try to trip up foreigners on purpose here, like Spanish does with "el agua" (which is still a feminine word, but takes the masculine article because "la agua" is too hard to pronounce).

French does this too: "mon" is masculine, "ma" is feminine, "ami" is masculine (so "mon ami" is correct), "amie" is feminine, but you have to say "mon amie". Some things contract (like "n'est", "c'est", "l'homme"), but not "ma."

Except words ending in "ma" that came from Greek (o problema, o estigma) which are masculine, while those from Latin (a alma) are feminine as expected. In Spanish it's basically the same. A Spanish teacher gave me a nice mnemonic: "-ma is masculine, like your mother." I've never forgotten that.

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.

There's an active gender distinction in English between people (using the relativizer who) and everything else (using the relativizer which).

It is an area of current dispute whether the pronoun it can be applied to people or not.

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.

Are you talking about case system? If so, for me, a native speaker of a Slavic language, it doesn't matter that I was born speaking that language, I still use the wrong cases sometimes. The main problem with cases is that oftentimes they are irregular.

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!

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 :/

Background: Dutch, had a few years of English education starting at iirc 11yo (but we also had French and don't parle me avec that so that was really just foundational), got fluent mostly just from chatting in videogames

We were never taught adjective ordering, at least that I remember, since the concept was new to me a few years ago (I'm 32). It seems natural to me, but of course it's entirely arbitrary and so it must be that I simply picked it up from reading other people's English (many of whose was not native either, so that it still worked is actually interesting)

I don't have this problem in English, I have it in my native language. It sounds super wrong to me that people say "that concept is called X in the math" instead of saying "... in math". I've never understood why this feels wrong to me, why couldn't you put a 'the' before it? But in English that's a well-established thing. Maybe my brain is wired wrong and short-circuits on Dutch

> if word.startswith("ub"): return False

An uber-rich man riding in an Uber installed an Ubuntu package.

I'm actually a bit surprised by this rule. Is this line there entirely due to the word "ubiquitous"? I think it is.

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.

Because vowels are sounds, not letters

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.

It always feels a bit like hitting a speedbump mid-flow!

Mostly breaks concentration/focus etc.

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.

For example “I have an MBA” and “I know a mechanic”.

When you pronounce the M from MBA, you hear the e in front, you’re saying em-bi-a. But for mechanic, you just have a stromg m.

This is what I mean by “if it sounds like a vowel”. And hence an and a.

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.

I think it'd be reasonable to keep uber, but I had dropped it because it wasn't in /usr/share/dict/words on Linux or Mac. That was a quick&dirty way to filter out proper names, but it misses some other words too.

I was wondering why you involved that dictionary, but this makes sense.

For anyone else wondering what the problem is supposed to be with that example: some English speakers call ubuntu "you buntu" whereas uber is just pronounced, well, as you write it and not "youber"

I used Ubuntu before learning English so it took me a while to realise

I added the word list to the main article. The rule is for two words, ubiquitous and ubiquity, so maybe the rule should be tightened to word.startswith("ubiqu").

Uber and Ubuntu are not in my word list (which attempts to exclude proper nouns), but maybe I should add uber, uberant, uberous, uberously, uberousness, uberty, uberties.

I had a self-imposed time limit of 1 day for this side quest, but there are lots of ideas in the comments here so someday I may come back to this project and give it another day.

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.

Australian native speaker here. Only the first "the" is a schwa for me.

Must be tied to how we both pronounce the first "a" in apple differently.

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.

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 do too, but with an exception—if I’m going to emphasize the word “actual” I’ll say “thuh ACTual” but with a full stop after the “the” so that I can really chew on that first syllable for the emphasis.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

A quirky story about A vs. An.

When I was in third grade we started studying english (I'm Swedish). One day our teacher was aiming to teach us when to use a vs. an.

I came home and showed my mother what I had done during the day, and I had copied the drawing the teacher had done on the blackboard that basically stated that "A" was used for singular and "An" for Plural. Example given was: A foot, An foots.

End of story

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.

Don’t forget keinen/keiner/keinem/keines as well

dutch also has 3 articles: de/het(definite) & een(indefinite); and there is an entire chain of rules that largely(99%) do nothing for semantics besides track that arbitrary distinction.

for example: there are 2 ways of saying [this](deze,dit) and 2 ways of saying [that](die, dat).

not sure how gender-classes entered languages but they can be a pain!

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.

"anorack" is a specific spell checker to tell if we need "a" or "an". It uses espeak to decompose a word into phonemes.

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!

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.]

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

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.

Perhaps relevant to this audience: NetHack has a routine specifically for this.

https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack/blob/NetHack-5.0/src/objn...

I think I agree with the comment in NH5 that some of the new cases "probably shouldn't be handled here", and think maybe NH3.4.3's simpler version should've been fine for NetHack's purposes:

https://github.com/Vanilla-NetHack/NetHack-3.4.3/blob/master...

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.

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

Interesting analysis

> [LLM It doesn’t need to be clean or maintainable. It only needs to be correct

But correctness is precisely the issue with LLMs?

But also

> I would’ve spent more time on the trie simplification algorithm and less time on parsing cmudict and re-learning d3.js.]

You could've spent nothing on D3 because the result is bad/poorly readable - much worse than a simple table alphabetically-aligned interception table, which I could use to answer curious questions such as "how can I compare "A" and "O" in terms of exceptions? or "which letter has the most exceptions"?")

(and the blue color is out of place, vowel/consonant split should visually be the same "category", not black/colord. Red for exceptions is fine)

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.

> but not the rule governing why.

Be glad you didn’t have to learn German, our grammatical gender only has more exceptions than rules.

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.

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.

> 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.

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:

> Rachel Maddow "an historic day"

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 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

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 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.

It is similar to "they were there" vs. "they was there". You might as well call both examples as a regional pronunciation.

I prefer to call both of them mistakes. :-)

Otherwise we just end up accepting anything as valid, anything as a proper usage. The spelling bee loses any sense, because all the losers will claim that they were simply speaking/writing English in their own way.

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

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

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.

I asked Claude and it showed me various examples of other words that may well be preceded with "an", such as heroic, habitual, and hereditary. It's to do with how strongly the "h" is pronounced.

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.

> because who says "an history lesson"?

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:

> if you're pronouncing the "h" (which everyone does).

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".

> (which everyone does)

I don't think this is true. I'm pretty sure I don't ever pronounce the h in historical if I'm coming into it from "an." "Anistorical." The "i" takes care of the "h."

Also "a history" becomes "[ə:]istory" (but definitely not "an history") and "the historical" becomes "th[ə]istorical." Definitely no "h."

It gets dropped in other situations, too. "Speaking of wh[ə]distoricallyappened..." I can't be sure when I don't drop it, other than when the word is bare. Fairly boring black middle-class midwestern accent.

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

It's interesting in NI because haitch-vs-aitch is so much more obvious than any of the other common shibboleths that it's become almost a comically exaggerated thing - something that people feel free to comment on or even joke about in a way that they wouldn't about anything else.

(Derry vs Londonderry might beat it for sheer obviousness, except for the fact that no-one, even the most hardened Unionist, actually calls it Londonderry in everyday speech unless they're making a point... or work for the BBC)

But, in reality, I think it originally comes from Hiberno-English vs Mid Ulster English, the two main dialects of English spoken in Ireland, rather than anything to do with religion. The association with religion came with the post-famine wave of emigration to Britain, and it was only after that that it began to filter back to Ireland.

(That's the story I was told at school, anyway...)

Aha, this is interesting, because I didn't know the origin of it. The only reason I'm really aware of it is because some of the children I look after go to a catholic school, and say haitch really obviously.

> even the most hardened Unionist, actually calls it Londonderry in everyday speech unless they're making

thick NI accent the SIX COUNTIES! (at this point I would then quickly withdraw to a safe distance and hope I haven't set off a riot.)

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:

  a historic
  a historical
  an historic
  an historical

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.

Sure, but note that a tiny LLM is many order of magnitudes larger than algorithms like this. It might well work better, but you're probably paying for very, very marginal improvements with a solution that's thousands of times larger and slower, unless you're you're being really creative and using a fairly non-LLM network of perceptrons or other ML technique. But it sounds like a fun challenge; if you or anybody feels like exploring that, I bet it'd get quite a few curious clicks here!

It really depends on the use case, which the author didn't hint to (sure, they say procedurally generating text, but exactly how and for what reason?). But whatever it is, I assume it needs to be accurate to some degree, and having a deterministic ruleset is just too subjective and superficial to cover all cases.

It doesn't need to be a full-fledged LLM either. What I mean is that a probabilistic machine learning model trained on a sufficiently large dataset is probably a better choice here. Small language models are pretty efficient nowadays, even for on-device use cases with constrained resources.

Well, I did once scrape wikipedia and classify based off simply off string suffix (storing those where longer suffixes disagreed with the shorter rule), and that's quite simple and effective - https://eamonnerbonne.github.io/a-vs-an/AvsAnDemo/ - and since it's based off actual statistics, it correctly distinguishes textually subtle stuff like "a NASA scientist" vs. "an NSA analyst".

There are structural limitations (i.e. this implementation never looks at preceding context and sometimes that matters, nor does it understand other clues like punctuation or multi-word suffixes). Nevertheless, the accuracy is high enough that I'm not sure it'd be easy for a small model to beat it, especially not without considerably more work to make sure your inputs cover more context (which in principle the plain statistics approach could likely deal with too).

If the whole point of multi-layer networks is to deal with weirdly shaped, non-obvious manifolds in a very high-dimensional space, then this problem just doesn't look that difficult and perhaps does not need that mathematical finesse: just store the prototypical examples and you're pretty much there without anything fancier.

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...

To me, English punctuation seems chaotic compared to Bulgarian, which could be hard but logical. English spelling is better than, let's say, Greek or French.

As a developer, I'm surprised people write either "Hello world!" or "Hello, world!" In Bulgarian, as in Russian, the addressee is always set off by commas.

Most people can ignore APA rules and just wing it. E.g. English comma is more of a "there's a pause" in most communication.

Don't know about Bulgarian, but Russian punctuation is notoriously horrendously complicated. I still remember a dictation [1] which had a sentence that had a comma after nearly every word. (And this last sentence would have three)

> English spelling is better than, let's say, Greek or French.

Can't speak for Greek, but IIRC in French a collection of letters usually conforms to a rule. "eu" or "ou" will rarely represent different sounds.

Whereas one of the famous spellings of "fish" in English is "ghoti": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti?wprov=sfti1

[1] Common in Soviet and post-Soviet schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise)?wprov=sft...

Listening to a Finnish children learn English there are some cases where they struggle and perhaps some of it is vocabulary, "fall" vs "fell", "freeze" vs "froze" (i.e. past tenses).

But there are lot more gotchas and I think pronounciation is one of the biggest gotchas. Finnish is a bad starting point as the language has very regular pronounciation, but hearing a child read new text it's obvious how difficent pronounciation is to learn for even everyday, commonly-used words.

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.

> for some words, we use an. For example, an apple.

The rule is fairly simple as it was taught to me - if the word (apple) begins with a vowel sound, use “an” to avoid cacophony. Same way one uses “o” (means “or” in Spanish) but “u” if the next word begins with a vowel.

What matters is the sound though, not the character - so it’s not as trivial to algorithmize. Eg. A hammock, an hour.

This is covered exactly in the post right under that sentence. Why just restate it?

As a native speaker of a language without articles, I understand how articles work, I know(or at least knew at some point) the grammar, but I still omit them unintentionally. And the most frustrating part is that I use English every single day, probably even more than my native language.

I’m glad this was posted. I’ve always wondered about this but was either too lazy or too afraid to look it up.

Good, but having a plot subtitle "Tree style visualization of the first two letters of a word Visualization showing whether the first two letters of a word are enough to determine whether it should have “a” or “an”" isn't very informative. Tell me how to read it

For those looking for a satirical scientific treatise of "a" vs "an": https://specgram.com/PsQ.XVI.4/06.pulju.indefinite.html

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?

Pardon me. I actually pronounce it heitsh, but I don't think there's a concensus among Australians about that.

"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.

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).

  “a San Francisco startup” /ə ˌsæn frənˈsɪskoʊ ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/
  vs
  “an SF startup” /ən ˌɛsˈɛf ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/

i.e. you have to mentally pronounce the phrase before choosing which form of the indefinite article to write

Which sucks when I'm writing about SQL because it works both ways: "An es-cue-el query" "A sequel query"

yes, that was another one I had in mind.

  /ən ˌɛs.kjuːˈɛl ˈkwɪri/
  vs
  /ə ˈsiːkwəl ˈkwɪri/

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.

Of course regional variations are a thing here too - for example in Welsh accents, it often is "An unicorn" (pronounced like "an iwnicorn")

"a whole nother" is one of my favorite linguistic quirks.

"an apron" used to be "a napron"

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 ;-)

"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!

*hones

What about "An honorable man" spoken with an American accent? British accent?

Dialects and syntax are weirdly fascinating .

That’s confusing because I was taught whether something is vowel or consonant is the spoken, not written, truth.

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.

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 think this is a alignment issue.

An actual use case for Jev?

Grammar Nazi here. The first sound in unicorn is a semivowel, not a vowel. You're welcome!

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:

> 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.

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

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!

> Can anyone explain why this happens?

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            |

Thank you!

A honest or an honest?

impressed and curious

As a non speaker, I really hate this rule

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