English: A vs. An

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.

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 on is the doctor.)

With different expressions, you are not expressing the same thing, but different ideas (some of them more preponderant in use in a territory).

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.

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.

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?

Certainly English can be odd. It can usually be understood through tough thorough thought though.

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.

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

Here the 'a' is shifting position to become the world final 's'

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...)

There is no plural equivalent of a/an. So where you would use a/an becomes no-article for plural nouns.

I suppose you could say, “they are both doctors” or “they are all doctors.”

Those sound fine to me, depending on context.

Over-learning Portuguese (as a beginner) almost make me feel that "He is a doctor" should become "They are as doctors".

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.

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

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.

How do you feel about adjective ordering rules? I always wondered what this was like from the outside.

As a patron of the 405, there is no consensus.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a Russian who's fluent in English, I feel like I ended up learning it mostly by example (Slavic languages lack articles, but we have other fun things for people learning them to trip up on, like cases). But a more general rule seems to be that it's "the" if you can point your finger at that particular thing or rephrase it with "that", otherwise it's "a".

I 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.

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

You use the word "a" for interchangeable, fungible items and "the" for specific, unique, non-fungible items.

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.

Just curious, what is your native tongue?

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

Both schwa for me, native speaker who grew up in Scotland.

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'.

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.

Comedians often make jokes.

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.

I learned English as a second language and was taught it was thee before vowel sounds and thuh before consonants. Is it wrong?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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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”

But I bet she drives a Recreational Vehicle instead of an Recreational Vehicle.

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.

A more natural way to see it is that Chinese does not really have tenses in the first place.

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)

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 ;-)

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.

> but not the rule governing why.

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

You just need to lend an ear.

Who says this? I haven’t heard it once in my life

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

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

Thanks, I was wondering about the exceptions!

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

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.

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...

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

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

An would always be wrong here, in the U.S. at least.

Depends on whether or not you pronounce the H.

"an apron" used to be "a napron"

I feel the same way about "an homage". The H is normally pronounced on "homage" - for example, you would not say "pay homage to" with the faux-French pronunciation. So you therefore would say "a homage". It sounds so pretentious when people pronounce it the other way.

thanks for the confession, you are simply guilty of ignorance. I on the other hand am guilty of thinking the English and the French both sound pretentious about pretty much everything: they are both always judging people.

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..."

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 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.

> 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            |

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.

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

a.k.a. "hard attack". There's a nice video on the subject by linguist Geoff Lindsey: https://youtu.be/nCe7Fj8-ZnQ

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.

No

A/an herb, for example.

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