Posted by azhenley 13 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_...
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
“a San Francisco startup” /ə ˌsæn frənˈsɪskoʊ ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/
vs
“an SF startup” /ən ˌɛsˈɛf ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/
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.
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
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"?
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
An arrvee.
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.
Kex = biscuit, from "cakes"
Keps = hat, from "caps"
"I ate a single peas" "I ate many peas"
People thought it was a mistake and generated "pea" for a new singular.