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Reality vs Fantasy
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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We expect our management to know when to use 'an' instead of 'a'.
Would it be "an"? Does the a/an rule apply to whatever the next word is or does it apply to the word it is targeting? "An mindset" would be incorrect.
In American English, the article “an” is used for a vowel sound to separate the words so they don’t blend together when speaking.
Normally, “a” always precedes a consonant, while “an” precedes a vowel. But “an” also precedes vowel sounds - i.e., the sound of the letter of the beginning of a word.
Hour starts with a consonant, but is pronounced with a vowel sound at the beginning. Thus, it is not “a hour” and rather “an hour”.
In the case of the example from the meme, id argue that either article works:
My take - I like “an ‘I’m…’” best. Both in text and verbal form. Others may disagree as far as verbally said; however, grammatically in written form this is how it should be.
Edit: Fixed the inevitable autocorrects from typing this on mobile.
This does get confusing with say...
"A/An herb."
Because different dialects pronounce herb differently, sometimes the 'h' is pronounced, sometimes not.
I know you specified American English, but even within American English, you can find areas that differ on this, and I'm sure there are other words where this kind of thing crops up.
Also, I guess this may be worth mentioning as well:
Though this no longer seems to be as common as it was 10-20 years ago...
"An hero."
Sometimes, either an unintentional misuse of this a/an rule will be ironically copied, and more widely used, essentially to either mock the original usage/user...
... or the a/an rule can be intentionally misused, as a way of infantilizing yourself, trying to come off as cutesy/ditzy, or maybe play up your own awkardness or inexperience, something like that.
~~English being my second language, from why I’ve learnt, “a […] mindset” is correct.~~
Edit: I stand corrected
The rule I've always used is that if the first letter of the word immediately following it is a vowel, it's "an" and if it isn't use "a".
For example, "an apple" or "a potato". If there is an adjective, go by that first letter, for example "a large apple" or "an average potato".
For anyone scrolling, I've followed a similar rule. Except an is used anytime the following word makes a phonetic vowel sound. E.g ah, eh, ee, oh, ooh
Tell that to British midlanders: "Can I have a glass of wo'a?"
Or when they ask for a nonion.
Fun English facts: "apron" used to be "napron", but "a napron" was eventually incorrectly split into "an apron". Same with "adder" which used to be "naddre", and "umpire" which was "noumpere"
Native English speaker here. This is incorrect, the "n" is added for phonetic help "a elephant" involves an awkward break between the two words, so enter "n" to help mouth muscles work around that.
This is the same reason for weird artifacts like: "a unicorn" because unicorn starts with. "Yoo" sound and so mouths don't need the help of the "n" to break up the awkwardness.
Also seconds language but I’ve learned it depends on how the first letter of the following word is spoken. If the following word has a vocal sound (even if the first letter is technically a consonant), it’s 'an', which it thusly would also be here.
So much badlinguistics in this subthread.
Edit: Instead of responding to individual comments, I'll just put what's going on with "a" and "an" here:
This alternation is a morphophonological process (specifically a sandhi alternation), whereby in native, fluent speech for most dialects of English, "a" is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a consonant, and "an" is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a vowel.
In contrast to what many people in this subthread seem to think, this is NOT to "ease pronunciation". This is easily demonstrable since "a" and "the" have the same vowel sound in fluent speech (for most dialects of English), but while we get "a cat" but "an apple", we don't get "the cat", but "then apple". This alternation, therefore, is not a regular part of English speakers' phonology (that is, part of the regular, unconscious processes that occur between sounds in all environments), but rather an idiosyncratic part of English's morphophonology, in that it's a phonological process that only happens in the presence of certain morphemes (simple words or word-pieces).
Why is this the case? Because "an" was originally just the word "one" that became reduced over time until it took on its own separate grammatical function, and later there was a regular sound change whereby "n" was deleted in certain specific unstressed environments before consonants, leaving an accidental alternation between "a" and "an" as a result of sound change.
This means that the "a"/"an" alternation in Modern English is not to "ease pronunciation" in any way - like with many phenomena in English (and all languages for that matter), it's just a vestigial remnant of an accidental historical process.
We know this is the case because the exact same thing happened to "mine", and in earlier dialects of English there was a similar alternation, "my cat", but "mine uncle". This alternation later collapsed in most dialects into our modern my/mine distinction, adding further evidence to the conclusion that this is not a phonological alternation, but a morphophonological one.
What all of this means, is that for a native English speaker that still has an "a/an" distinction (I don't have one in my dialect, for example - I put "a" before everything when speaking fluently: "a cat", "a apple"), if they don't put a pause between "a" and "I'm" to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say "an I'm", and if they do put a pause between "a" and "I'm" to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say "a I'm".
Because "a" and "mindset" aren't in a local configuration to each other, they will have no morphophonological influence on each other whatsoever (just like in "an able mindset", for example).
So, while I won't say that saying "it's 'a' because of 'mindset'" is wrong (because right/wrong aren't really useful terms when describing language), I will say that it does not conform to the linguistic behavior of native English speakers when speaking fluently.
Feel free to respond to this comment with any follow-up questions you have, and I'll be happy to answer them.
I'm not disagreeing with your larger point but I don't necessarily buy the part of your explanation saying
because in most dialects (at least of American English) "the" before a consonant uses ə while before a vowel sound it's ē.
I don't think that's accurate, but I'd be happy to see a source proving me wrong. I looked briefly, but wasn't able to find a paper dealing with that alternation specifically (though I didn't look very long, and there may very well be one).
Also, I'm pretty sure that for the dialects that do use "strong the", they also use "strong a" in exactly the same environments, which to my mind makes it a non-issue.
Either way, there are plenty of other ways to get a word-final unstressed schwa followed by a word-initial stressed vowel, and we never see an "n" repair in any of those other situations either - the important point is that this is a process centered entirely around a single lexical item, and it doesn't make sense for a process affecting a single lexical item in a common environment to be "easing pronunciation".
First, I agree with most of what your saying, but:
Why do you frame that as a dichotomy? To ease pronunciation, we take the older form (containing the consonant at the end) when a vowel follows and the reduced form (without the consonant) when a consonant follows. We alternate between these forms to ease pronunciation. Same for "the": Arguably, the "strong the" is not /þi:/ but /þıj/ ending in a constant (/j/) and is therefore favored when a consonant follows to ease pronunciation. Sometimes it's used for emphasis which also happens with "an" so it's basically the same phenomenon.
There are other factors at play, as you pointed out the break to indicate quotation and regional differences. Also the glotal stop might not be consciously perceived but still trigger the same result as any consonant.
I for one use the a/an distinction as I learned it at school while having a glottal stop heavy accent due to my native language so I will say stuff like /ʔən ʔɛpl/ and act surprised when people know where I'm from.
Good questions - hopefully the explanation here helps clarify my position.
We don't, though. This is clear from the fact that "the" occurs in exactly the same phonetic environment (including the lack of stress), with exactly the same vowel, and it doesn't show the same behavior. This data tells us that there's no articulatory reason for this alternation. There is no phonotactic constraint active in English that speakers are getting around with this behavior - the process is specific to a single morpheme.
There are tons of other ways we could make this exact same sequence of unstressed schwa followed by another stressed vowel as well, and in exactly none of them do we ever see an "n" inserted to repair the hiatus the way we do with /r/ in many dialects (which one could analyze as an example of "easing pronunciation", depending on one's assumptions, though I probably wouldn't with all of the deserved stigma around the ill-defined idea of "easing pronunciation"). This is telling us that this alternation has nothing to do with "ease of pronunciation", since speakers clearly don't need their pronunciation eased in this environment.
As for "strong the" specifically, we see a parallel form in "strong a", which can also be argued to end with a yod, and which seems to alternate under the same conditions as "strong the" in most dialects, whatever those conditions are. For this reason, I don't really think "strong the" is very relevant to the discussion.
When the sound change originally took place, of course, it could be argued that it was for "ease of articulation" purposes since the change was regular, but post facto explanations for sound change are always a bit dicey.
So, if you want to argue that the original source of the alternation was "ease of pronunciation", well, sure, maybe, but it's pretty clear from Modern English data that the "a/an" alternation has nothing to do with ease of articulation at all.
It's a dichotomy because something either eases pronunciation, or it doesn't, and in this case, the data makes it clear that it doesn't. It may feel "easier" to speakers because it sounds wrong to them without it, but that's due to morphophonology, not phonotactics, and it's why we rely on tests like the above instead of speaker intuition whenever possible.
How about this: let's take the f/v morphophonemic alternation in leaf/leaves, knife/knives, etc.
There's a decent argument to be made that this medial voicing change in Old English was originally to "ease pronunciation", but once this alternation became morphophonemic, the "ease of articulation" argument falls apart pretty quickly.
I don't think any serious linguist would assert that it's 'life/lives' in Modern English due to "ease of pronunciation" instead of "historical accident" when 'fife/fifes' and countless other later borrowings do not show the same alternation, and the 'a/an' alternation is this exact same sort of morphophonemic process.
You do not seem to be aware of that since your variety also lacks the a/an distinction, but '"strong the" before vowel' is a rule at least promoted by my teachers. So it is the same phenomenon. This is true for other words, too like to (/tə/ vs /tuw/). "a/an" is just the only example visible in writing and your variety doesn't seem to have these distinctions at all so your excused for not knowing about them. Lindsey has a video, I can look it up later.
Saying it is possible to pronounce doesn't mean it can't be eased (is that wording right? You know what I mean). Language changes isn't that regular. There are distances I sometimes walk or take the bus to ease the travel. This isn't that strict. Language change often effects some words, or a single one but not others. For instance "listen" has a silent "t" in most varieties even tho it's easy to pronounce and speakers didn't need this shift, it just happened. Examples where this didn't happen prove nothing.
And your f/v example fails because it's fossilized. The "e" that softens the f to v went silent but the v stayed voiced and even voiced the s (to z). The a/an distinction on the other hand is productive. It's "an honor to join a union" since the h in honor is silent and "union" starts with [j]. People even say "an historical event" because the unstressed h is too weak. Even the glottal stop, while not consciously perceived as a consonant, can trigger this. Lindsey also shows this in a video.
So when did it stop ease the articulation? When it fossilized? When it stops being productive? Because, as shown above, it didn't. It's still regular. Silent letters don't effect it, it's still all about pronunciation, about easing the articulation and only implemented where it does this job. And it always only effected this word so it was never as regular as [f]>[v] between vowels. It always, and still does, effect this one word in a very regular way.
And it's not an inserted "n". I think of it as an "a/an alternation" but you can also think of it "an losing its n" just like to (/təw/) loses its w. And this framework also explains why "my/mine" didn't stay: when /i:/ shifted to /aj/, there was a consonant at the end anymore and the /n/ no longer needed to ease the articulation.
I hope you see why I don't think your position is very convincing. How can you ignore than simplifying pronunciation is a key factor in language change?
Sorry for the late response - yesterday was a crazy day IRL. I think my reply here is too long, so I'll have to break it into two comments.
You have quite a few serious misconceptions about linguistic concepts in general here, so I'm going to try to go topic by topic to address them, and hopefully by the end the idea will become clearer:
The Regularity of Sound Change
The first serious misconception is your idea that "sound change isn't that regular".
It was discovered in the second half of the 1800s by a German group of young researchers called the Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) that sound change is in fact completely regular and exceptionless in its environment. This is called the Neogrammarian Hypothesis, or just "The Regularity of Sound Change", and it's the foundation for all of historical linguistics (as well as being the advance that led to the discovery (by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and the rest of the oft-ignored Kazan School in the late 1800s) that synchronic phonology is regular as well - which, by the way, is exactly why sound change is regular). Linguistic reconstruction, and even proving that languages are related to each other, is not possible without the assumption of the regularity of sound change (for reasons I can explain if you're interested), and data from around the world has borne out the hypothesis again and again.
Note that when looking at historical data, you will undoubtedly find what appear to be exceptions to the regularity of sound change. These exceptions always occur after the sound change, and are always due to either: 1. Analogical processes or 2. Borrowing/Lexical Innovation.
Analogy
Note, however, that the initial sound change will have been perfectly regular in its environment (because, again, that's how sound change works), and the later analogical processes have created what only appear to be exceptions to the sound change in question.
(As an aside, it's worth noting that once analogy (or borrowing) begins to create forms that violate the environment for the original sound change, we can conclude that the phonotactic constraint that led to the sound change in question is no longer active in that language's synchronic phonology. This is the answer to your question: "When did it stop ease the articulation?")
Borrowing
(This is often a better test for when "easing articulation" stops than analogy - if a language can borrow a word or alternation with that pattern, then that pattern must not be disallowed by that language's phonotactics any longer.)
If a borrowing happens before a sound change, that borrowed word will undergo the sound change just as any other word of the language will, but if the word is borrowed during/after, it will only undergo the change if the phonotactic constraint (the synchronic realization of a sound change) is still active.
An Example
On to an example. I'm so glad you picked "listen" - it's perfect for our purposes. This sound change is completely regular, as it turns out; it's the change that gives us silent "t"s in listen, and soften, and fasten, and whistle, and thistle, pestle, castle, and many others. The environment is easily defined: t > 0 / 'VF_l/n (that is, "t" is deleted after a stressed vowel and a fricative, and before a syllabic (or schwa-supported, if you prefer) n or l, and every single word that fit this pattern at the time this phonotactic constraint was active underwent this change, without exception.
Now, you might very well ask, "What about often? It perfectly fits this environment, but in my dialect (maybe) it's pronounced with the 't'!" What happened here is what's called "spelling pronunciation", which is a type of Analogy.
Once the phonotactics of the language have changed (after all of these 't's have been removed from the language, the phonotactic constraints of the language changed, and these sequences were allowed again (there just weren't any present for a while - an "accidental gap")). Then, speakers a few generations later began to pronounce "often" specifically with a 't' due to its spelling (likely in a misguided attempt to sound more "correct"), and we now have what appears to be an exception to a perfectly regular sound change, even though it's not really an exception - the sound change affected 'often' just the same, but then another process came along and changed it afterward.
(Note that only "often" is affected by this analogical change - analogy is irregular and unpredictable in its effects, unlike sound change. This is because analogy is a lexical process, while sound change is a grammatical process.)
So, to sum up: Yes, sound change is perfectly regular in its environment, and if it looks like it isn't, then either a) You have the wrong environment b) Analogy has affected the output of the change or c) The apparent exception is a borrowing or later creation of some sort. These are all of the possibilities - there aren't any others.
Note that what you've said here:
is technically correct, but only because you're conflating sound change and analogy. Sound change is regular, while analogy is not. (Check out Sturtevant's Paradox for more about this - it's fun, though it's a bit orthogonal to our discussion here.)
Productivity and Regularity in Synchronic Phonology
In the same way, synchronic phonology is also regular, and describable through the same sorts of rules as diachronic phonology (though we should note that these are not describing the same object - synchronic phonological rules describe processes happening in a single human brain, while diachronic sound rules describe relationships between grammars that exist at different points in time, a meta-analysis, hence de Saussure's famous argument about the primacy of synchrony over diachrony).
What this means, in the context of the current conversation, is that if, as you say, the "phonetic easing" process is still active in modern English, you need to be able to provide a regular, exceptionless environment that can describe it.
You've attempted to do this to some degree with your consonant deletion examples (even if your proposed pronunciations for strong "the" and "to" are pretty dicey), but in order to prove that the sound law that produced the a/an alternation is still a regular phonotactic constraint in Modern English, you'll have to provide a regular synchronic sound rule that can exceptionlessly describe the phonetic environment of the constraint in question that leads to the deletion, which I don't think you'll be able to do.
Note that your proposed rule must not be specific to individual lexical items or refer to morphological or syntactic boundaries. This is because:
Structure is not Visible to Phonology - the Modularity of the Grammar
It's traditionally assumed by most generative linguists that the grammar is largely modular - that is, each phase of the generation of an utterance is separate, and proceeds one at a time with little overlap between the modules. So, syntax first builds the structure of the clause, and then morphology (which does not have access to the syntactic structure (though see Distributed Morphology for modern attempts to unite syntax and morphology)) builds words to fit into the structural positions that syntax built, and then phonology (which similarly cannot see either syntactic or morphological structure) determines the sounds that are sent off to be pronounced by the articulators. (Note that the actual relationships are a bit more complex - see Kiparsky's 1982 book on Cyclic/Lexical Phonology for a famous example that's pretty accessible, but the generalization holds well enough for the data we're dealing with here.)
What this means is that synchronic (and diachronic, for that matter) sound rules only ever apply in phonological environments, that is, to strings of phones and suprasegmental features like tone, stress, etc. (which does include prosody), and not to individual words.
So, in order for the "ease of pronunciation" constraint you're referring to here to still be active in Modern English, it must be describable as a phonological rule that applies exceptionlessly in a specific phonological environment, regardless of the words or structures that are actually present.
This is why I don't think you'll be able to show that the a/an alternation is still a regular, productive alternation in Modern English. The a/an alternation is not predictable - there is no general rule in English phonology of which its behavior is a subset. A child acquiring English just has to learn that for this specific morpheme, there's an "n" before vowels and no "n" before consonants, and, crucially, no generally describable phonological sequence in the language works this way.
We can test this with the analogy and borrowing tests above. First, through the analogy test, "my/mine" no longer behaves this way, because its behavior has been altered through a combination of analogy and grammaticalization - the sound law clearly no longer holds in its environment, so the phonotactic constraint that produced it is no longer active in the language. Second, and this is admittedly a hypothetical, I don't believe that any new monosyllabic word borrowed into English ending in -an (or -uw or -ij, for that matter) would show the same alternation in any environment, which would again indicate that the phonotactic constraint is no longer active.
All of this is because the regular sound change that originally produced this alternation is really just as fossilized as the medial f/v alternation: neither alternation can be successfully described using exceptionless synchronic sound rules, and must therefore be stored in the lexicon ("fossilized") and learned as exceptions by new acquirers.
(Note: Both of these alternations are morphologically/lexically-conditioned allomorphy, if you're interested.)
I hope this makes sense. Sorry if this was way too much info - it felt nostalgic, like being back in front of my third- and fourth-year undergrad students again, and I got a bit carried away. Also, I like your username. :)
Let me know if anything here is unclear or if you have further questions.
First, I got most of my linguistics education in German so sorry for my bad example when I was looking for an English one. If that's OK, I would use German ones from now on and try to give enough context.
I'm aware of this school of thought, I just didn't know people still subscribe to it. The narrative I was tought in uni was that when linguists found the first sound shift (Grimm's Law) and the second one (High German Consonant Shift) and the one in between (Verner's Law), they were hyped and felt they can math out everything, like a world formula, everything can be determined. But at some point, they realized it's much more messy and while there certainly are rules that work at a birds view level, the devil is in the detail and this approach can't explain every individual word. This might be a philosophical question tho: Is everything regular but we don't know all the rule or are there "real" exceptions?
I'm aware of borrowing and analogy but a factor you forgot to address is frequency. Frequently used words tend to get shortened and infrequently used words get more regular. I know this happens in English as well, but I rather use a German example than a bad English one: "haben" used to mean "to own" but when it became an auxiliary verb (as "to have" did in English), many forms got shortened and now form a paradigm unique in German (there is no analogy here). The "b" is omitted in 2nd and 3rd singular but not in 2nd plural which normally is the same as 3sg. Also: 1pl "(wir) haben" turns colloquial to "ham" while infinite and 3pl stay "haben". No regular sound shift or analogy or borrowing, just shortening of frequent words.
Verbs will shift between strong and weak conjugation: "küren" used to mean "to choose" and was a strong verb, now it has a specific meaning "to reward someone in a competition" and is more regular (unlike your outdated Sturtevant’s Paradox paper suggests ;) ). "Preisen" (to praise) is a loan word that turned into a strong verb.
And I know strong/weak verbs are analogy (while "haben" is not!), this points to a misunderstanding we seem to have: when I say "regular" I mean deterministic, you seem to mean there is a pool of rules you can pick and choose (different ways to get less regular for example). Chess is rule based as in you can't just move anywhere but there are still many options and maybe you castle a second time and no one notices. In German we sometimes differentiate between "Labyrinth" and "Irrgarten". In the former, there is always only one path but you feel lost anyway. This is how my 19th century countrymen thought of language change. In the latter, you have many crossroads and can end up in different places. I hope this analogy makes sense. I don't know if this difference also exists in English. And honesty, your "analogy to written language" (which I would rather call hypercorrectism but you can argue it's an analogy) is so arbitrary, at that point you can just argue anything and call it a rule, which is fine, there certainly is influence which I would rather call a tendency than a rule. BTW you could as well argue that this is loaned from a dialect that didn't make the shift but I don't know the data for that, might be wrong.
You repeat that like a dogma but don't give any logical explanation. As I tried to illustrate above, next to the bird eye view of regular sound shifts, frequent words will often work in their own logic because the more frequent a word is, the more important to – you guessed it – ease its pronunciation. I don't see how "easing the pronunciation" only applies to regular sound shifts and not to the shortening of frequent words (which also is part of language change).
Or to put it differently: I think you said at one point that it is a relic that used to ease the pronunciation but not anymore. Is that a statement you agree to? Because if so, when did it stop to do that and turned into a relic? That's what I meant when I said you make it into a dichotomy: it's a continuum and the a/an alteernation is closer to its beginning than to fossilization because it certainly still does the job and follows the same rule it used to, even tho it is the only word that follows this rule. If it only occurs in some lexemes (and I don't mean the lexeme "a" but the following one), then it is fossilized. Makes me wonder: Do you say "another" in your variety or "a other"? Because that would rather fit the v/f-example for me (especially if the "o" shifted to "wa" and there was no hiatus eitherway, just to illustrate my point not that this was a likely shift).
So sum things up:
Not that this matters to my argument but a little "fun fact" about me: While most of my lectures were given by generative linguists, my master thesis was about Role and Reference Grammar, a framework that explicitly tries to link morphology, syntax and pragmatics more closely together (phonology explicitly not tho). I currently read a book that includes prototype theory from cognitive linguistics which also is created in opposition to generative linguistics. I know this is still the predominant school of thought but I wish it wasn't. My master thesis was in Applied Computer Linguistics (with a strong emphasis on "computer" on my part tbh) and I also worked with Sumerian there too as you might have guessed :)
But to your point: If your theoretical framework doesn't allow something that happens, isn't that rather bad for the framework than for reality? Some famous guy once said: All models are wrong but some models are useful. Well, yours doesn't seem to be in this instance.
And all the prescriptivists just collapsed onto their fainting couches.
(I kid, nicely done. Also fuck prescriptivists.)