Indefinite Articles

Recently a friend asked me about indefinite articles in English. You know, “a” and “an.” The rule is to use “an” before vowel sounds, “a” before consonant sounds. Why the “n”? We hear illiterates say “a apple” all the time, even though we never hear anyone say “an fish.”

First, a little background.

In Greek, they have a thing called thematic vowels. They don’t mean anything; their sole purpose is to make words easier to pronounce. Greek has a lot of inflections (word endings put there for grammatical reasons) and sometimes (to the Greeks, anyway), the beginning of that inflection didn’t sit right with the end of the root word, so they slipped in a vowel to smooth over the transition. For example, the root lu- (related to our word “loose”) could have an inflection that means a certain type of first person singular (-mai). Well, they didn’t like to say “lumai,” so they said “luomai.” (Yes, Greek scholars, I’m oversimplifying.) If you think the Greeks had it bad, Sanskrit was worse. They had this sort of thing between every pair of words, called “sandhi,” meaning “a putting together.” (This, I am told, is the origin of the word for the ice cream treat “sundae.” —a putting together of sauce and ice cream.)

That’s pretty far afield from English. All you need to get out of all that is that we can put in letters to make things easier to pronounce. Two more digressions:

• The word comes from the German word for “one,” “ein.” So the “an” form came first.
• Some words that started with “n” transferred that initial letter to the article! “Uncle” used to be “nuncle.” This is called juncture loss, by the way.

So there you have it. The only reason for the two forms is to make English sound better. Be thankful that’s the only rule for the indefinite article in English. Here’s a chart for the same thing in German:

Don’t even get me started on “the”!

PS. I just ran into this Rabbits Against Magic comic. I think he meant to write “an” instead of “and.”