I used to work in management for a Fortune 100 company, and they’d send people around for little afternoon management seminars on one thing or another (usually sexual harassment stuff).
One day, one of the visitors mentioned that money wasn’t even in the top 5 reasons that people work, and tried to move on from that, but I stopped them, and made them repeat it, and then said “Well that’s not true at all. It’s literally the ONLY reason ANYONE goes to work.”
They tried to argue it, but I just said "If it’s a Payday Friday, and the boss doesn’t hand out the paychecks, and tells everyone that there won’t be any future paychecks, but they’ll see everyone on Monday, the boss will walk into an empty office on Monday. Nobody works for any reason other than a paycheck "
And that was a great job, that almost everybody reading this would enthusiastically grab without thinking twice, but nobody is going to do it for free.
Diddlydee@feddit.uk 1 month ago
We expect our management to know when to use ‘an’ instead of ‘a’.
Bubs@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Would it be “an”? Does the a/an rule apply to whatever the next word is or does it apply to the word it is targeting? “An mindset” would be incorrect.
CatZoomies@lemmy.world 1 month ago
In American English, the article “an” is used for a vowel sound to separate the words so they don’t blend together when speaking.
Normally, “a” always precedents a consonant, while “an” precedes a vowel. But “an” also precedes vowel sounds - I.e., the sound of the letter of the beginning of a word.
An apple A banana An hour
Hour starts with a consonant, but is pronounced with a vowel sound at the beginning. Thus, it is not “a hour” and rather “an hour”.
In the case of the example from the meme, id argue that either article works:
My take - I like “an ‘I’m…’” best. Both in text and verbal form. Others may disagree as far as verbally said; however, grammatically in written form this is how it should be.
evening_push579@feddit.nu 1 month ago
English being my second language, from why I’ve learnt, “a […] mindset” is correct.
hakase@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
So much badlinguistics in this subthread.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I’m not disagreeing with your larger point but I don’t necessarily buy the part of your explanation saying
because in most dialects (at least of American English) “the” before a consonant uses ə while before a vowel sound it’s ē.
RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And all the prescriptivists just collapsed onto their fainting couches.
(I kid, nicely done. Also fuck prescriptivists.)
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
First, I agree with most of what your saying, but:
Why do you frame that as a dichotomy? To ease pronunciation, we take the older form (containing the consonant at the end) when a vowel follows and the reduced form (without the consonant) when a consonant follows. We alternate between these forms to ease pronunciation. Same for “the”: Arguably, the “strong the” is not /þi:/ but /þıj/ ending in a constant (/j/) and is therefore favored when a consonant follows to ease pronunciation. Sometimes it’s used for emphasis which also happens with “an” so it’s basically the same phenomenon.
There are other factors at play, as you pointed out the break to indicate quotation and regional differences. Also the glotal stop might not be consciously perceived but still trigger the same result as any consonant.
I for one use the a/an distinction as I learned it at school while having a glottal stop heavy accent due to my native language so I will say stuff like /ʔən ʔɛpl/ and act surprised when people know where I’m from.