The articles a and an

Today I’m going to go over the singular indefinite article in English: a and an. Before I get into that, do you remember the lesson recently on the International Phonetic Alphabet? I’ll be referring back to that today, so if you need to brush up on it, take a few minutes to review the symbols and how IPA works. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Back? Good! OK now, first off, I’m going to define indefinite articles even though that definition really doesn’t have much to do with today’s lesson since today’s lesson is more about sound (phonology and more specifically morphophonology) than grammar (in this case, syntax and semantics). So, here it is:

      Indefinite article– the article which is used to refer to one unspecified object or person or to an unspecified group of countable objects or persons. In English, the indefinite articles are: a, an, some.

Wonderful. Now, since English doesn’t have grammatical gender, we don’t have to worry about masculine, feminine, neuter or any other type of article distinctions; we just have to think about singular or plural then whether the word begins with a vowel sound or a consonant sound. That’s where the morphophonology comes into play. Phonology is the study of the sounds of a language and how they are produced, morphology is how words are formed and created within a particular language, and morphophonology is how words are altered morphologically to make them fit into a language better phonologically. A great example of this occurs in borrowings into English from another language. A word like hors d’œuvre [ɔɣ.dœvχə] contains sounds that don’t exist in English, so we create a new word based on our own set of sounds and make it [ɔr.dərv]. See?

We not only alter borrowed words to fit our own sound system, we alter our own words to make speech more fluid and intelligible. That’s where a and an come in. If you’ve ever studied French (a language obsessed with making their words flow together fluidly), this part will make much more sense. Otherwise, I’ll try to make it as clear as possible.

All languages have vowels. That’s what we call a language universal. All languages have consonants too of one form or another, but to be honest, they’re not as important as vowels. The most common way vowels and consonants are put together is consonant-vowel, written as CV. Some languages have this pattern for all syllables. Some languages allow for VC and/or CVC or other combinations, but the most common is still, by far, CV. VV is possible, and many of languages allow for this, but there are plenty of languages that don’t or at least try to avoid it. (Same goes for consonant clusters like str CCC at the beginning of words or nk CC at the end, but English doesn’t worry about breaking those up. A language like Japanese, however, doesn’t allow consonant clusters and so would insert vowels. Neat, huh?) French is an excellent example of avoiding vowel clusters. Their definite articles le (masculine singular) and la (feminine singular) become l’ in front of words beginning with vowel sounds to avoid having CV V. With l’, it goes back to the default CV. Le enfant is instead l’enfant. Still with me?

English also has its own little morphological tricks to revert back to the CV formation. Our indefinite article has two forms: a and an. The former is used before a consonant sound, and the latter before a vowel sound. So a car is V CVC. No VV combinations. If I have the word orange which starts with a vowel, I’ll use the article an instead of a. This way, I’m not saying a orange V VCVCC but an orange VC VCVCC. It’s just part of the English language that we try to break up vowel clusters but not consonant clusters.

The definite article can even be used like the French definite article, contracting it to the following word in order to avoid VV combinations. The elephant in careful speech remains CV VCVCVCC, but in fast speech (and especially in particular dialects), the schwa of the disappears and it’s pronounced more like th’elephant, C’VCVCVCC. See? Say both a few times and see if you tend to drop the schwa of the when you talk too. I know I do.

The problem arises, however, when we move from the spoken language to the written language. As I’ve said before in TKT #8, what we say and what we write are often very, very, very different. A word like university is written with a vowel at the beginning, but it’s pronounced with a /j/ sound just like the word you. That’s why it’s a university. The word hour is similar. It’s written with a consonant but pronounced as beginning with a vowel, making it an hour and not a hour.

The problem is even worse for initials and acronyms. USB is written with a vowel, but when you say the letters aloud, it comes out as [ju:.ɛs.bi:]. That starts with a consonant sound, so it’s a USB port rather than an USB port. STD may be written with a consonant, but it’s pronounced [ɛs.ti:.di:], beginning with a vowel sound. Therefore, it’s an STD, not a STD. Generally, people get it right when they’re talking because they’re not thinking in terms of orthography. It’s when people write it down that they suddenly forget how they say it aloud and therefore which is correct.

The /h/ sound produces its own problem in both written and spoken English. For some English speakers, the /h/ is very slight and therefore almost nonexistant, leaving the vowel behind to pick up the attention as the start of a word. There are many dialects of English where the /h/ is dropped altogether (watch My Fair Lady for examples of this) causing even more confusion. I’ve even heard of random rules that state that with certain words beginning with /h/, the written form uses an but the spoken a. How ridiculous is that? An example is an historic moment. I don’t know about you, but I pronounce the /h/ in historic and have no reason to use an in front of it in either spoken or written English. The /h/ sound may well end up being a TKT of its own some day, but for now, let’s just shake our heads at it and wonder how an honest consonant could go so wrong.

So there you have it: a and an in a nutshell (Well, a nushell the size of a football, but who’s counting?), and hopefully that makes their usage a little clearer once you get this basic rule into your heads: a in front of consonant sounds, an in front of vowel sounds. The end.