Comments on: Articles: “A” vs. “An”

By: Mistu4u

Mistu4u — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 03:29:23 +0000

Quite true, but unfortunately for those who don't know Hindi, it won't work.

By: Martha

Martha — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:14:36 +0000

Some links to the many, many questions on this subject would be useful.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/629/when-should-i-use-a-versus-an-in-front-of-a-word-beginning-with-the-letter-h http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152/when-should-i-use-a-vs-an http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1019/a-or-an-for-words-that-dont-start-with-vowels-but-sound-like-theyre-starti http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/do-you-use-a-or-an-before-acronyms http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3368/a-an-preceding-a-parenthetical-statement

By: H Stephen Straight

H Stephen Straight — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:59:46 +0000

Perhaps the trickiest of the most common "corner cases" pertains to the adjectival form of the word history. In the word historic(al) the stress moves from the first syllable to the second and, for most speakers, the h becomes silent unless the word is in phrase-initial position. These facts produce the following results:

A history of the U.S. ...

An historical account ...

By: Vaibhav Garg

Vaibhav Garg — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:23:02 +0000

I happen to be a Native Hindi speaker, from India. Hindi has a phonetic script, and hence the vowels are always vowels. A neat little trick that I use, and the one that never fails, is to picture the word as being written in Hindi( Devanagari script). If it starts with a vowel in Hindi, an "an" would be used, otherwise an "a" would have to be used.

By: Nicholas Paldino

Nicholas Paldino — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:48:37 +0000

I am one of those people who was taught that vowels and consonants a re letters, not defined by phonetics.

All this time, I was applying the "a" and "an" rule to the incorrect definition of vowels, but when saying the statement in my head, it never sounded right.

This definitely clears it all up. Bookmarked.