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  • There's also "the" vs "the". As in "the boy ate the apple". First 'the' ends with a schwa sound. Second 'the' ends with 'ee' sound.
    by Dwedit
  • > if word.startswith("ub"): return False

    An uber-rich man riding in an Uber installed an Ubuntu package.

    I'm actually a bit surprised by this rule. Is this line there entirely due to the word "ubiquitous"? I think it is.

    by bugufu8f83
  • Fun fact an adder (snake) was once a nadder, and an apron was on a napron. This fun fact brought to you by The History of English Podcast.

    https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

    Happily sourced in Wikipedia so I don't have to figure out which episode I learned that from:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder <- see below the table in Taxonomy.

    by mauvehaus
  • The most problematic for me as a non-native has been "the" vs "nothing", i.e. when one can/should put the definite article.

    Pre-LLM I was joking that real AI is whatever can make that decision correctly 100% of times.

    by theanonymousone
  • As a native speaker of a language without articles, I find the English article system by far the most intuitive and easiest to learn of all the languages I have studied. Most other Indo-European languages have articles that you simply need to memorize, as there is no way to derive them from the word itself. Which I never manage to do.
    by deliciousturkey
  • It's avoiding two distinct vowel sounds in succession.

    Consider other variations of this rule.

    In French, one would say "l'hôpital" rather than "le hôpital" because the 'h' is an aspirated breath (try saying "a aspirated" rather than "an aspirated") leading to an initial vowel sound.

    In Irish, the word for father is "athair". To say "her father" it becomes "a hathair" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prothesis_(linguistics)

    In Turkish, it can be seen with araba (car). "I saw the car" -> "Arabayı gördüm." (note the 'y' to avoid two vowels). Book is kitap and "I saw the book" is "Kitabı gördüm." Which doesn't need the additional consonant sound between the final sound and the "ı".

    Whatever language you speak, it likely has some form of this rule.

    And other languages have the quirk too (like the "a unicorn" or "a university"). For example, in French there's l’hôtel and l'hôpital. But if you've got the hedge... it's la haie... or even more egregiously, the marmoset is le ouistiti.

    by shagie
  • What gets me as a non-native speaker far more than "a vs an" is the "a vs the" conundrum. I still don't quite get when something needs to be "indefinite" and I've been speaking English for close to forty years. My native tongue lacks articles altogether and it's soo bloody hard I feel hopeless I'll ever master them fully.
    by abraxas
  • A funny quirk of English I never noticed until I started learning Spanish:

    In Spanish, to say for example, "he is a doctor," you would say "él es médico." Which more literally translates to "he is doctor," which feels unintuitive coming from English. Spanish DOES have an equivalent for "a" - "un/una", so the natural thing for an English speaker to say would be "él es UN médico", but I understand that to be awkward/unnatural.

    But then I realized, when you say the same sentence in plural - "they are doctors" - you don't have an article. You don't say "they are some doctors" (I had to Google, apparently "some" isn't an article anyway?)

    So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."

    Unlike English - Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."

    by hbn

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