indefinite article rule

November 21st, 2008
  • hello kids, for all you armchair grammarians out there, gran's looking for a specific grammar rule as it applies to "a" and "an." we all know you use "a" with words beginning with consonants and "an" with words beginning with vowels/vowel sound. what I'm looking is at least three reputable reference sites that address the exception to this rule -- where "an" is used with words beginning with a consonant but which have a predominant vowel sound. for example, "will consider giving the patient *an* SSRI," "consider doing *an* MRI." these, however, are both acronyms examples. are there other exceptions to this rule not involving acronyms? please omit examples of words beginning with "h." thanks ever so much, GB


  • Granny -- I hope that I correctly understood "Go, Baby" to refer to me as the "baby." So I am hereby transporting my comment into the answer box, with a thought on pinkfreud-ga's comment added at the end: Since I started the "Y" thing, I took it upon myself to browse through the seven pages of my American Heritage Dictionary to look for other candidates. Here are the nouns I found, which can take the indefinite article "an". I have thrown in an "X" word at the end. 1. Yggdrasil -- "The great ash tree that holds together earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches in Norse mythology." (Proper noun) Use in Sentence -- "Here is an Yggrasil.com 'Pointless poll': Which of these beers, judging solely by name, sounds like the most interesting to try? Delirium Tremens, Pirate Ale, Pranquester, Rogue Dead Guy, Skull Splitter, Spaten Lager, Wood Chuck Granny?" http://yggdrasil.net/ 2. ylem -- "A form of matter hypothesized by proponents of the big bang theory to have existed before the formation of the chemical elements." Use in Sentence -- "The Paracloud Crystal is an 'Ylem-featured product' at the Community Store at ylem.org": http://www.ylem.org/ 3. yquem -- "A sweet white wine from the Sauterne region of southwest France." Use in Sentence -- "Julie was so particular about what she drank that she insisted on an Yquem spritzer." 4. Ypres -- "See leper." (It turns out to be a town in Belgium, also known as Leper.) (Proper noun) Use in sentence -- "In Belgium, an Ypres tradition is its annual Cat's Festival." http://sepdata.virtualave.net/belgium1.html 5. ytterbia (or ytterbian oxide) -- "A soft, bright, silvery rare-earth element . . . ." Use in Sentence: "In an earlier paper, we reported on a small grid-connected thermophotovoltaic system consisting of an ytterbia mantle emitter and silicon solar cells with 16% efficiency (under solar irradiance at Standard Test Conditions (STC)." http://people.web.psi.ch/palfinger/2002-rome-tpv-durisch.pdf 6. yttria (or yttrium oxide) -- "A silvery mettallic element, not a rare earth, but occurring in nearly all rare-earth minerals, used in various mettalurgical applications . . . ." Use in Sentence: "The aim of this research is to exploit the microstructural modifications brought about during preparation of an yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) in order to impact the material's performance when applied as a thermal barrier coating (TBC)." http://www.epscor.org/davis.html The only other word I can come up with that begins with a consonant, is not hyphenated, and takes the indefinite article "an" is "Xmas." The source for all of the words is the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition (1992). The source for the sentence examples are the websites cited, except that I made up the example about the wine spritzer. Finally, with regard to pinkfreud-ga's comment about "X-ray," I did not consider hyphenated words like "X-ray," "F-stop," "L-dopa" and many others to be true examples of qualifying nouns because they are compound words with their initial "word" being a letter of the alphabet. markj-ga


  • Granny -- Upon reflection, I think I can articulate why I have been unable to find sites that discuss non-acronym/abbreviation exceptions to the familiar "a-an" general rule. It is probably because the general rule already includes the notion that words that begin with a vowel "sound," not necessarily a vowel, are always preceded by the indefinite pronoun "an." This means that my several "y" examples -- which are all derived directly from foreign languages -- are not really exceptions. That would leave "Xmas" as the only example I can find of a single word (i.e., non-hyphenated or compound, and not an abbreviation or acronym) that takes an "an" and begins with a genuine consonant; that is, a consonant that is not substituting for a vowel in the way the "y" substitutes for "i" in the other examples. I did find an online source with an especially interesting discussion about words that begin with a vowel but take the indefinite pronoun "a" because they begin with a consonant "sound." These include the words "one" and "union" (and many other words beginning with a long "u". Here is a link to that discussion: Linguist List http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/msg00537.html Interestingly, using "an" with such words was once accepted, but is now "entirely obsolete:" Bartleby.com: American Heritage Book of English Usage http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/001.html markj-ga


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