Why you should know: The ‘a’ vs ‘an’ conundrum is not about what letter actually begins the word, but instead about how the sound of the word starts.

For example, the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent, so you would say ‘an hour’ and not ‘a hour’. A trickier example is Ukraine: because the ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘You’, and in this case the ‘y’ is a consonant, you would say “a Ukraine” and not “an Ukraine”.

Tip: when in doubt, sound it out(loud).

Reference

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  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Is that similar to Transatlantic speak? Transatlantic comes from pronunciation and pitch that carried well on poor radio signals preceeding the digital age. Meanwhile, I swear it was something in the MidAtlantic US that won most neutral English accent… Or most neutral American at the least.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Kinda sorta.

      The actual accent itself doesn’t sound the same, but I think you’re getting at how it came to be.

      The PNW dialect/accent is basically a subset of the Californian dialect/accent, with a few differences.

      It arose as being very close to ‘General American’ because it was the last, or latest part of the US to be settled by significant numbers of English speakers, and is an amalgamation of the accents of English speakers from many different pre-exsting American dialect regions.

      People from the PNW often do not even realize that they have an accent, as it is so close to a sort of normalized middle ground of other US American English accents.

      TransAtlantic accent/dialect specifically arose because of the technology, as you say… and also I think a bit from social circles of basicslly upper class NorthEasterners who had enough money to regulalry interact with actual UK English speakers themselves, whereas PNW accent/dialect seems to not have arisen intentionally, and isn’t as strongly tied to the upper social class of the region.

      Seattle and Portland’s first major population booms were the result of the Alaska goldrush near the end of the 1800’s, with basically lower class people coming from all across American (and other parts of the world) either using them as a last port to stock up and buy supplies before heading north, or setting up a business to sell those supplies to those people… and a whole lot of them returned to Seattle or Portland after the Alaska gold rush.

      https://pacificupperleft.com/does-the-pacific-northwest-have-an-accent/