Do you say 'AN article' or 'A article'?

A investigation into a interesting development!

0:00 Intro and articles
0:49 Hiatus
2:39 Hard Attack
6:03 Weak Form Strengthening
6:55 'A' before a vowel in London, S Africa and AAVE
9:43 'A' before a vowel in General American
13:36 'A' before a vowel in British English
14:41 What can possibly go wrong?

Anne Hathaway by VOGUE Taiwan, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

[WayneKitching]

The title almost gave me a hard attack!

[van-hieuvo]

Etymologically, it wasn't so much that the indefinite article gained an "n" before a vowel, but that it lost that "n" before a consonant. "An" was a merely weak form of "one", even though it ultimately developed its own strong form. The "n" only persisted before a vowel to block hiatus. Other words like "an" include "mine" and "thine", which also lost the "n" before a consonant, but unlike "an", they came to end in a consonant, and therefore didn't need "n" to block hiatus before a vowel either, which resulted in "my apple" and "thy eye" instead of "mine apple" and "thine eye". The strong pronunciation of "a", which ends in a consonant, kinda leans into that direction as well, so I think "a apple" is just as reasonable as "my apple."

[DeadStuffGuy]

I am always impressed with the breadth of sources you use for you examples, it also makes it extra fun when I recognize someone

[EnviedShadow]

This channel makes me so self-conscious about how I talk.

I love it.

[thevector]

Me at the start a Dr. Lindsey video: "Interesting pronunciation variation. I always use variant A."
At the end: "I no longer know how I pronounce anything. I possibly don't even speak English."

It's a lot of fun, if a bit befuddling.

[Thecognoscenti_]

My favourite example of incorrect a/an usage is when Jeremy Clarkson deliberately uses the wrong form to draw attention to the object being emphasised ("an cow", "an horse", "an van", "a egg")

[christianb]

Again very entertaining and enlightening. And this time without a dubious sponsor. So let me compensate you a little bit for that. 👍

[Naegimaggu]

14:46 This might also be because of the way the template is programmed. The string might simply be "Purchase a {thing_to_be_purchased} on official {vendor_platform_name}" which is much easier and begets less questions from the person reviewing your pull request than writing:
article = "an" if thing_to_be_purchased[0] in 'AEIOUaeiou' else "a"
message = f"Purchase {article} {thing_to_be_purchased} on official {vendor_platform_name}"

[borealmarinda]

I looked up "extreme marshmallow cannon" after hearing the example of Obama saying that to know the context, and the first link I found had "a extreme marshmallow cannon" written down. An immediate example of written form example of this development.

[jBM]

As a Bangladeshi living in South Africa, that one section of the video felt as if it was calling me out.

[_oaktree_]

I'm a native speaker of American English. I remember being taught that "a" was correct only before a consonant, and that "an" had to be used before a vowel – anything else was incorrect. I still instinctively feel that way, even though I know that this is prescriptivism and therefore A Great Evil In Our Time ;) but now having watched this video I also realize that this "error" is far more widespread that I ever noticed, and in much more varied and interesting ways! And I also realized that I am not at all consistent with how I say the word "to" and "the" before a word beginning with a vowel or a consonant. Despite my somewhat prescriptivist tendencies, I too am liable to some of these inconsistencies – a real hypocrite! This was a great watch, thank you... a good reminder that language is truly always changing, and always in different ways than one might think.

[PaulH]

6:03 I've noticed this a lot over the past few years, where younger YouTubers avoid using weak forms. My son watches one particular LEGO YouTuber who almost always pronounces "the" as THEE, and "a" as AY. I suspect that these YouTubers talk this way in an attempt to sound more formal or intelligent, but that's not how they sound to me. To me, this weak form avoidance makes them sound robotic. In fact, this speech pattern reminds me of an elementary school student reading aloud in class, and doing it badly -- having to slow down and read one word at a time. So this speech pattern gives me the impression that the speaker is reading (poorly) from a script that he's not familiar with.

[IHTACast]

I love your channel so much. You’ve quantified observations I’ve noted to myself I thought nobody else even noticed.

However the more I watch your channel the more I hear people instead of listening to them LOL

[simonbramwell]

I enjoyed your example of the 8 muffins. It reminds me of an English work colleague (educated at Gordonstoun) who told me how he'd caused a problem at a bar in the Netherlands when asking for a beer. The barman started pouring lots of beers. When he was asked "what are you doing?", the barman replied "you asked for eleven beers! I thought you had friends coming to join you!". It turns out the the phrase in Dutch "Elf bier(en)" (11 beers) sounds exactly like the English spoken phrase "I'll have a beer" (elluvabeer).

[stevieinselby]

I like the fact that we have _the_ definite article because there's just the one, but we have _an_ indefinite article because there are two of them!

[thatotherted]

Ah yes, Oscar winner Anne Icon. I do like her work.

[Sinthoras]

14:00 Imagine being Dr Lindsey, always on the lookout for linguistic anomalies. Even if you just want to create a Discord Server, you have to be on the lookout

[RaytheonTechnologies_Official]

0:18 "Allomorphs" was actually my favourite early 90s Saturday morning action cartoon

[srmjo]

I'm glad you have touched on the use of "thuh" + glottal stop rather than "thee" + y before a noun starting with a vowel. I first became aware of it, in American speakers, a decade or so ago, and in the intervening time it seems (to me) to have spread like wildfire. We can now hear plenty of younger people in England, even BBC reporters, saying "thuh earth" and "thuh architect". Interesting that you situate this phenomenon as part of an increasing tendency of hard attack. 🙏

[selmiespot]

i always learn so much watching your videos! the bit about the two "the" forms was eye opening, i had always thought the stressed form was only ever used for emphasis, but it turns out i use it all the time before vowels!