Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
an European
|
This mistake is one of my pet peeves that would drop me out of a book. It's "a European".
https://www.quora.com/Which-is-corre...n%E2%80%9D-Why
Quote:
- “a European” (CORRECT)
- “an European” (WRONG)
Whether we use “a” or “an” is more directly related to how the beginning of a word is pronounced out-loud, than how the word is spelled.
“European” begins with a consonant sound. In fact the beginning of “European” has the same sound as the following words:
- yard
- year
- yellow
- yes
- yet
- you
- young
- your
The letter “y” is sometimes used as a consonant When I say that “European” begins with a Y-sound, I mean the consonant “y,” not the vowel. The word below all use the vowel-variant of the letter “y.” If you learn nothing else from this, I hope that you will realize that English spelling is atrocious. It would make sense to keep the way people speak English out-loud the same, but devise a new writing system such that:
- there is a one-to-one correspondence between written letters and sounds
- an English word can be turned from writing into sound by reading each letter from left-to-right out-loud.
|