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They can keep them as far as I’m concerned.

And they can keep them as far as I’m concerned.

I’m doing my part!

I don’t think that’s accurate, but I’d be happy to see a source proving me wrong. I looked briefly, but wasn’t able to find a paper dealing with that alternation specifically (though I didn’t look very long, and there may very well be one).

Also, I’m pretty sure that for the dialects that do use “strong the”, they also use “strong a” in exactly the same environments, which to my mind makes it a non-issue.

Either way, there are plenty of other ways to get a word-final unstressed schwa followed by a word-initial stressed vowel, and we never see an “n” repair in any of those other situations either - the important point is that this is a process centered entirely around a single lexical item, and it doesn’t make sense for a process affecting a single lexical item in a common environment to be “easing pronunciation”.

Good questions - hopefully the explanation here helps clarify my position.

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 don’t, though. This is clear from the fact that “the” occurs in exactly the same phonetic environment (including the lack of stress), with exactly the same vowel, and it doesn’t show the same behavior. This data tells us that there’s no articulatory reason for this alternation. There is no phonotactic constraint active in English that speakers are getting around with this behavior - the process is specific to a single morpheme.

There are tons of other ways we could make this exact same sequence of unstressed schwa followed by another stressed vowel as well, and in exactly none of them do we ever see an “n” inserted to repair the hiatus the way we do with /r/ in many dialects (which one could analyze as an example of “easing pronunciation”, depending on one’s assumptions, though I probably wouldn’t with all of the deserved stigma around the ill-defined idea of “easing pronunciation”). This is telling us that this alternation has nothing to do with “ease of pronunciation”, since speakers clearly don’t need their pronunciation eased in this environment.

As for “strong the” specifically, we see a parallel form in “strong a”, which can also be argued to end with a yod, and which seems to alternate under the same conditions as “strong the” in most dialects, whatever those conditions are. For this reason, I don’t really think “strong the” is very relevant to the discussion.

When the sound change originally took place, of course, it could be argued that it was for “ease of articulation” purposes since the change was regular, but post facto explanations for sound change are always a bit dicey.

So, if you want to argue that the original source of the alternation was “ease of pronunciation”, well, sure, maybe, but it’s pretty clear from Modern English data that the “a/an” alternation has nothing to do with ease of articulation at all.

It’s a dichotomy because something either eases pronunciation, or it doesn’t, and in this case, the data makes it clear that it doesn’t. It may feel “easier” to speakers because it sounds wrong to them without it, but that’s due to morphophonology, not phonotactics, and it’s why we rely on tests like the above instead of speaker intuition whenever possible.

How about this: let’s take the f/v morphophonemic alternation in leaf/leaves, knife/knives, etc.

There’s a decent argument to be made that this medial voicing change in Old English was originally to “ease pronunciation”, but once this alternation became morphophonemic, the “ease of articulation” argument falls apart pretty quickly.

I don’t think any serious linguist would assert that it’s ‘life/lives’ in Modern English due to “ease of pronunciation” instead of “historical accident” when ‘fife/fifes’ and countless other later borrowings do not show the same alternation, and the ‘a/an’ alternation is this exact same sort of morphophonemic process.

I think you mean “scale main”.

So much badlinguistics in this subthread.

Edit: Instead of responding to individual comments, I’ll just put what’s going on with “a” and “an” here:

This alternation is a morphophonological process (specifically a sandhi alternation), whereby in native, fluent speech for most dialects of English, “a” is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a consonant, and “an” is unconsciously placed before words beginning with a vowel.

In contrast to what many people in this subthread seem to think, this is NOT to “ease pronunciation”. This is easily demonstrable since “a” and “the” have the same vowel sound in fluent speech (for most dialects of English), but while we get “a cat” but “an apple”, we don’t get “the cat”, but “then apple”. This alternation, therefore, is not a regular part of English speakers’ phonology (that is, part of the regular, unconscious processes that occur between sounds in all environments), but rather an idiosyncratic part of English’s morphophonology, in that it’s a phonological process that only happens in the presence of certain morphemes (simple words or word-pieces).

Why is this the case? Because “an” was originally just the word “one” that became reduced over time until it took on its own separate grammatical function, and later there was a regular sound change whereby “n” was deleted in certain specific unstressed environments before consonants, leaving an accidental alternation between “a” and “an” as a result of sound change.

This means that the “a”/“an” alternation in Modern English is not to “ease pronunciation” in any way - like with many phenomena in English (and all languages for that matter), it’s just a vestigial remnant of an accidental historical process.

We know this is the case because the exact same thing happened to “mine”, and in earlier dialects of English there was a similar alternation, “my cat”, but “mine uncle”. This alternation later collapsed in most dialects into our modern my/mine distinction, adding further evidence to the conclusion that this is not a phonological alternation, but a morphophonological one.

What all of this means, is that for a native English speaker that still has an “a/an” distinction (I don’t have one in my dialect, for example - I put “a” before everything when speaking fluently: “a cat”, “a apple”), if they don’t put a pause between “a” and “I’m” to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say “an I’m”, and if they do put a pause between “a” and “I’m” to signal the quoted speech, they would likely say “a I’m”.

Because “a” and “mindset” aren’t in a local configuration to each other, they will have no morphophonological influence on each other whatsoever (just like in “an able mindset”, for example).

So, while I won’t say that saying “it’s ‘a’ because of ‘mindset’” is wrong (because right/wrong aren’t really useful terms when describing language), I will say that it does not conform to the linguistic behavior of native English speakers when speaking fluently.

Feel free to respond to this comment with any follow-up questions you have, and I’ll be happy to answer them.

I kinda unironically dig this.

I absolutely love it.

No, that’s an IED. You’re thinking of efforts to ensure that marginalized people aren’t discriminated against.

Woo autoantonyms

The other interpretation elides “who are”:

“It was the latest escalation of President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport all immigrants who are in the U.S. Illegally.”

This is similar to a sentence like: “Please point out all the boys eating hot dogs quickly”, which is also ambiguous in the same ways, but I feel shows the intended interpretation more clearly.

A significant number of linguists believe that words aren’t real, so…

I mean, yeah. Two different things can be true at the same time.

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The difference being that my “pedantry” is informed by history and linguistic theory, and is intended to stop linguistic prejudice, as opposed to the pedantry threads like this are magnets for: perpetuating linguistic prejudice while being completely wrong in the process.

Edit: Typo

The downside is that with appositive phrases present the Oxford comma can introduce ambiguity:

“Thanks to my mother, Mother Teresa, and the pope.”

In the Oxford comma system this is ambiguous between three people (1. my mother 2. Mother Teresa 3. the pope), and two people (1. my mother, who is Mother Teresa 2. the pope). Without the Oxford comma it’s immediately clear that “, Mother Teresa,” is an appositive phrase.

The opposite happens as well, where Oxford commas allow true appositives to be unintentionally read as lists:

“They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook”, where Betty is the maid mentioned.

This ambiguity is easily fixed, of course, but then again so is any ambiguity from not using an Oxford comma as well.

Note that I use the Oxford comma myself, but it’s still worth mentioning that both systems are ambiguous, just in different ways.

Here I am, calling out pedants for being literally and demonstrably wrong about language for two (and a half thousand, under the sloppy reading) years and counting!

I wasn’t trying to say that you necessarily were trying to feel superior - just that that’s why those so-called “distinctions” exist in the first place.

The reality is that natural human languages are always and inevitably unclear, redundant, etc., and there’s literally no way to change that. Even if you taught babies a logical conlang (constructed language) like lojban as their first language, within a single generation you’d begin to see ambiguity introduced into the system, because that’s just how humans are wired.

Language only has to be clear enough, which is borne out by the fact that every human has a different grammar, and yet we are all still able to communicate satisfactorily. There is no clarity to be gained from a pedantic differentiation between “jealousy” and “envy”, since in the vast majority of cases the intended meaning is immediately clear from context, and in the tiny minority of cases where it isn’t, an extra word or two will do the trick perfectly well, and that extra word or two will usually come naturally and unconsciously on the part of the speaker.