1061: A or An? Nov 4, 2017

The usual rule told to those when learning English is that 'a' is used for that state with a consonantal sound, and 'an' is used for words when the article precedes a vowel. There are at least two ways this can be confusing to some. Because English orthography is not phonetic nor even phonological, the letter 'u' can represent the [ju] in 'mute' at the beginnings of words, such as 'university'. Therefore, even though 'u' is a said to be a vowel, it represents two sounds in certain words, the former of which is a consonant, and would therefore take 'a' not 'an'. The other possible issue is that of which article to use before [h]: is something "a historic day" or "an historic day"? The first option is generally preferred, and much of the reason that people would use 'an' in this case is that historically the 'h' was not pronounced in the 18th and 19th centuries, as is still the case in some dialects of English. Interestingly, even though some people such as Bernie Sanders pronounce 'human' without the [h], this still does not necessitate changing the article because here, again, 'u' represents those two sounds [ju].