Whats the correct rule? I always thought any word that started with a vowel had to be ‘an’. So an apple, an umbrella. Are there exceptions like ‘a unicorn’? ‘An’ certainly doesnt sound right.
A unicorn. The rule isn’t that any word that starts with a vowel takes “an,” it’s any word that starts with a vowel sound. Since unicorn is pronounced as if it starts with “y,” it takes “a.”
Other common words that start with “u” and take “a”:
usage
uniform
union
unit
unique
united
Starts with a vowel sound. Unicorn is pronounced as if it starts with a y. It would be an undercover cop.
This is an exception based on the long U emulating the consonant Y. Can’t think of any exceptions to the exception, either. A uniform, a U-turn, a universe, a universal rule, a ukulele, etc.
Edited to add: Colibri is correct. It’s not an exception to the rule, rather the OP misstated the rule to begin with. (And I went along with it.)
Despite starting with a letter we in English typically call a vowel, the word actually implicitly begins with a consonant: the palatal approximant <ˈj>.
The ‘aeiou and sometimes y’ English vowel system is taught to schoolchildren but like most simple rules, there are lots of edge cases in which the rule fails. English, for example, actually has fifteen vowels, mapped imprecisely on about eight letters and varying significantly depending on dialect.
‘An usher’, ‘an umpire’, ‘an urchin’. In the case of words not starting with a vowel, but with a vowel sound you have ‘an honor’, though people often use ‘a honor’ because they believe the rule applies to the letters and not the sounds.
This is one rule in English that has no exceptions. Except for some a-holes who insist on saying “an historian”. That’s okay if you say “an 'istorian”, which some British dialects do. But when those Brits write it, certain people believe you have to say it as “an historian” despite the fact that the h is not silent in their dialect.
But here is the rule: “an” before a vowel sound, “a” before a consonant sound. No exceptions. French does it better. The indefinite article is always spelled “un” but the “n” is not pronounced before a consonant sound and is before a vowel sound. Actually, it makes a liaison with a following vowel. So it is not a spelling rule, but a pronunciation rule as it should be.
Incidentally, I once read in a phonology book that speakers of English make between 22 and 24 distinguishable vowels (depending on dialect). You may take that with a grain of salt since the same book claimed falsely that “l” is always lateral in every dialect of English. Still we have loads of vowels.
For the record, in my dialect, the first “l” in “lateral” is lateral. The second one is not.
In a sense, the rule the OP learned is correct; it’s just the context in which he learned the rule that’s incorrect. Vowels aren’t letters. They’re sounds. Some letters (namely, a e i o u and sometimes y) are often used to represent vowels, but those letters are not the vowels themselves.
This is one of those cases where you can feel when the wrong one is used. No “rules” required. Using A in the wrong place is awkward, for example “a apple”. It makes me twitch. Most people can “feel” when it’s right or wrong, can’t they?
You seem tense. Would you like an herbal remedy?
A eulogy. A one.
Neither of those would count, as his thesis was that of a word begins with a “u” pronounced like a “y”, it always takes “a” and not “an”.
Neither of those words begins with the letter “u”.
They are however good examples of the corrected form of the original rule vowel sounds take “an”, consonant sounds take “a”.
Spelled like they are pronounced, those words are yooligee and won, and both begin with consonants.
I may have misinterpreted the meaning of “Can’t think of any exceptions to the exception”. At any rate, I was just providing examples that aren’t of the U->Y form.
This is how all language rules work. If a native speaker can’t “feel” which one is right, it’s not actually a rule.
“humble” is another word that is sometimes preceded by “a” and sometimes by “an”, depending (I suppose) on whether the speaker thinks the h is silent.
It’s fair criticism but I think I already admonished myself as far as agreeing with the rule in the OP. Colibri got it right on the first try, I got it wrong. It’s not about long or short vowels, it’s the vowel or consonant sound that makes the difference.
You’d think so, but…
In my work I encounter a LOT of native English speakers who use “a” before a vowel sound. The just pronounce it “uh”.
As in “give me uh apple black” or “give me uh orange one” and so on.
Apparently, to these native speakers, “a apple” doesn’t feel wrong, even if it feels wrong to me when I hear it.
Though this is not nearly as grating as when they pronounce the number 100 as “uh hundred”. As in, “Give me a pack of Newport uh hundreds”.
That’s as bad as the people who think that “a 1000” is “a thousand”…
Well, the people you encounter in your work are obviously speaking a dialect which has a different rule in this regard.
Their dialect is obviously non-standard; in standard AmE or BrE we don’t say “orange one”; we say “one orange”. And, from what you say, in this dialect, ‘an’ before a vowel sound is clearly not the rule.
It feels grating you you because it violates a rule of your dialect of English, but it doesn’t feel grating to them because it violates no rule of their dialect of English.