Template talk:A or an
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Letters verses phonemes
The rule currently used by the template is to put an an in front if and only if the word starts with an a, e, i, o or u, and to put an a in otherwise. The rule is, of course, flawed. It leads to things like a hour, an euro, a honour, an unicorn, a 8-day trip, a 11th-hour decision, etc.
The problem can be fixed by accounting for these exceptions; however, there are two problems with this solution.
- There may be so many exceptions that we won't be able to cover them all.
- Some words can take either a or an depending on dialect/style.
The first problem won't go away (until we've gone through the whole dictionary), we can only try our best. There are, though, a couple of things which are going to make the going even more difficult than it might seem at first glance.
- What if the string starts with a numeral? If it starts with an 8, we can assume it starts with a vowel, but what if it starts with 11 or 18? (To make matters worse 1800 could be read as "eighteen hundred" or "one thousand eight hundred".)
- Acronyms are also a problem, e.g. an SMS, a US-lead invasion. Do we add these to our ever-expanding list or do we check whether the second letter is a capital, assume the thing to be an acronym and work from there? To make matters worse, though, some acronyms are pronounced as if they were words.
The second problem has a multiple aspects.
- The word herb has a /h/ for some of us but not others. It seems to be an American thing to drop the /h/ in herb so we could define a parameter, call it
engfor "English", and set it tousto get an herb. - The name of the letter H is called haitch according to some and aitch according to others. (If he works for HSBC, is he a haitch es bee cee worker or an aitch es bee cee worker?)
- Then there are the words beginning with h and with an unstressed first syllable, such as hallucination, hilarious, historic(al), horrendous and horrific, which some writers prefer to put an an in front of these. The use of a or an in front of historical, etc. doesn't seem to follow any national pattern so we'd have to use a different parameter here.
Jimp 09:42, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
Nomination for deletion of Module:A or an/testcases
Module:A or an/testcases has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. * Pppery * it has begun... 15:40, 17 February 2020 (UTC)