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).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Also interesting, in Ukrainian, the U is pronounced “oo”, so if we said it the way they did, it would be “an Ukraine”.
Don’t even get me started on the fucked-up anglicized versions of Slavic words. Fucking Kruschev and Gorbachev…
Actually Khrushchev. For some reason, х gets converted to kh. The rest is slightly stupid but at least understandable why it is so - щ was historically ш+ч, thus sh+ch (this pronunciation is still normal in Ukrainian, but not in Russian anymore), and the ‘e’ is just based on the usual spelling.
Uhhh I actually might need an example? Just one, though?
The Cyrillic character ё is pronounced as “yo”, but when preceded by some consonants, it becomes an “o”. It is consistently mistranslated and mispronounced by anglophones. The correct pronunciation of “Gorbachev” (Горбачёв) is “Gorbachov” and it should be written as such. The other, Хрущёв, is even worse.
Last time I saw someone say that anglicized words should be spelled as they should be pronounced, they were downvoted and shamed for being a prescriptivist.
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