Why What You Were Taught About Vowels Is Wrong
I was prompted to write this entry after answering a question about the subject in a language forum.
What it comes down to is what I call half-truth teaching, where something is presented to the student which is true a fair bit of the time but should, nevertheless, not be taken literally. With a bit of elaboration or better phrasing things would be better.
You know the kind of thing I’m thinking about. “You should never start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’.”
But for this example, they might have had a point. And that’s not all.
The subject I have in mind today is the indefinite article.
Hands up who was taught that a becomes an before a vowel.
Well that’s not the case. It doesn’t particularly matter to native speakers of English, since we naturally know when the exceptions occur.
It would be a strange event indeed to hear a person born and bred over here speak about “a honest man” or “an university”. Oh, it does happen, no doubt, as I mocked in this thread a while ago.
It shouldn’t be hard to understand what is happening here. The phenomenon of using a in some cases and an in others evolved naturally, and had nothing to do with spelling, which should be evident seeing as the great majority of English-speakers were illiterate at that point in history when the final n began to be dropped in some cases, finishing in about 1340.
Simply enough it’s the opening sound that determines which form we use, not the initial letter. When we are told that we use an before a vowel, we’re actually getting only half the story. Amend that sentence to “we use an before a vowel sound” and you’ve got it.
And that’s the reason that all but the most sloppy speakers of English will say that they’ll meet “an honest man in an hour.” Even though honest and hour start with consonants, their initial sounds are those of a vowel.
Conversely, all of us would naturally say that we’re “going to join a union at a university.” It matters not that those two words are spelt with initial-place vowels; they sound as though they began with a vowel, and this is why we all, from the day we learn to speak, break that rule that we learn at school.
So if you ever catch a foreigner getting in a muddle by deliberately putting an unnatural-sounding an in front of university just because they’re visualising the spelling, do them a favour and explain what they won’t have been taught: It’s the sound that determines what to use, not the spelling 