For example, in this forum there is a thread that starts “If a NFL player…”.
This jars me, because in my head I am pronouncing “enn eff ell” not “National Football League,” and so the article should be “an” not “a”. But I have never known if there is a rule covering this.
It seems to come up a lot, since so many abbreviations are like NFL where the first letter is a consonant. In these cases, to suit my ear, it should be written “an NFL player” or “a National Football League player.”
So is there a rule for this, and am I right about which article should be used in each case? Does it make a difference if the abbreviation qualifies as an acronym (i.e. pronounced as one word, like “radar”)?
Roddy
I would treat it as if I were saying it aloud. An NFL player. A RADAR system. The only issue would be if the acronym was sometimes spelled out and sometimes pronounced as a word, but neither of those examples are that way.
A/an is determined by phoneme, not letter. That’s why it’s correct to say a unique doll and not an unique doll. NFL player starts with ɛ which is a vowel phoneme and therefore calls for an.
There are some ambiguous cases where it can go either way, depending on whether someone pronounces the letters individually as an initialism or together as an acronym. I’m blanking right now for a very good example, but a weak one is “a URL” vs “an URL,” depending on whether you say “U-R-L” or “earl.” (Weak, because I don’t know anyone who says “earl,” although I heard that some people do.)
I always have it depend on how it is pronounced. For example, I am currently writing a paper in which we talk of “a UFD” and “an SPR”.
It irks me no end to hear oh so proper radio announcers saying “An historian”. It wouldn’t bother me at all if they said “An 'istorian”, but they don’t. Cf. “An honest man”. I guess every rule has to have an exception (except this one).
I think another example would be that, when I was younger, the term “an hotel” used to bother me, because in my accent I aspirate the initial h sound and so “hotel” does not start with a vowel. But it does in many other accents.
It’s confusing because elementary-school grammar teachers often teach the rule, but not the context for it. The rule is that you use “an” before vowels, and “a” before consonants. What they leave out, though, is that vowels and consonants aren’t letters, they’re sounds. So “NFL player” starts with a vowel, because it’s pronounced “enn eff ell”.
I don’t know how one could shoehorn it into the curriculum but I firmly believe college graduates or even better, high school students should have at least a semester of introductory linguistics. Too often, English and writing classes, while emphasizing freedom and creativity in content reinforce bad notions of language as a structure.
The difference is that in “historian,” the “h” is pronounced (as a consonant). In “honest,” the “h” is silent, so the “o” (a vowel) is the initial sound. This is an example of the rule, not an exception.
This is a case in which it can go either way, depending on dialect. Some dialects of English pronounce it with a hard h, in others the h is softer or absent, so it can be either “a historian” or “an historian.” Both are correct. But it’s wrong to say “an historian” while also pronouncing the h.