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.

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This was a question put to me by my friend, Camel, a few years back. He thought it preposterous that the indefinite article and the number shared the same form in that language, and wondered how the French didn’t get confused.

Camel’s not a language person, so I did my best to explain in simple terms. I think that I likened it to homonyms in English, such as comparing “I gave him his bag” with “I gave her her bag”, and letting him acknowledge that the presence of two different hers each with different meanings has never led him to confusion in English.

Of the languages that I know all follow this French example of having the same words for the number one and the indefinite article. Admittedly, I only know Germanic and Romance languages so my resource base is limited, but I’m now reassured by a passage I’ve just read in, of all things, a book on the history of mathematics.

It turns out that English did use to have the same word for the indefinite article and the number one. This word was ane. Somewhere between 1100 and 1500 the word ane took on two different pronunciations, depending on how it was being used.

So there you have it: English is perhaps unique in making this distinction, but it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t always the case

On a language forum that I frequent a Romanian girl has asked whether the sentence “I haven’t a car” is correct English, since she had read it in a book but was expecting to read “I don’t have a car” or “I haven’t got a car”.

There are the usual responses that are less than ideal, including one where a chap who was against the usage adjusted his position to say that actually it is permissible.

I don’t want to say that I would never use “haven’t”…

For example I would use the following in everyday speech:
- I haven’t eaten all day.
- Did you take the garbage out.?
No…no I haven’t.

Well, that was enough for me. He’d given a misleading answer in a thread that was all rather amateurish and riddled with inaccuracy. I felt the urge to inject some facts into it, and I think that this makes for a nice blog post, so I’ve copied it here.

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My friend Orry has just come back from a year’s travelling in the Antipodes. Having taught English very briefly in Thailand and enjoyed the experience, he’s returned under the rain with a sense of vigour and the desire to spend the next few years of his life working as an English teacher abroad. To this end, he’s enrolled himself on a course.

Anyway, he must be thinking about the subject a fair bit because he texted me the following message at the hour of 07:36 the other day:

English trivia for you — did you know that you say “didn’t we use to” instead of “used to” but you say “she used to”? Had no idea about that rule!

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