Why you should know: The ‘a’ vs ‘an’ conundrum is not about what letter actually begins the word, but instead about how the sound of the word starts.
For example, the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent, so you would say ‘an hour’ and not ‘a hour’. A trickier example is Ukraine: because the ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘You’, and in this case the ‘y’ is a consonant, you would say “a Ukraine” and not “an Ukraine”.
Tip: when in doubt, sound it out(loud).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Ha, that’s really interesting. Swedish has an interesting example of this as well.
Plural you (“y’all”, basically) used to be “i”, but because of an archaic inflection rule, there were often an “n” at the end of a word before “i” (like, “när kommen i?”; “when are y’all coming?”). Because of this, “i” eventually turned into “ni” since the n of the previous word merged with i.