A interesting development

[@van-hieuvo8208]

Etymologically, it wasn't so much that the indefinite article gained an "n" before a vowel, but that it lost that "n" before a consonant. "An" was a merely weak form of "one", even though it ultimately developed its own strong form. The "n" only persisted before a vowel to block hiatus. Other words like "an" include "mine" and "thine", which also lost the "n" before a consonant, but unlike "an", they came to end in a consonant, and therefore didn't need "n" to block hiatus before a vowel either, which resulted in "my apple" and "thy eye" instead of "mine apple" and "thine eye". The strong pronunciation of "a", which ends in a consonant, kinda leans into that direction as well, so I think "a apple" is just as reasonable as "my apple."

[@DrGeoffLindsey]

Yes, this got cut from the edit. This video started at 20 minutes, which seemed too long for the subject matter

[@bletwort2920]

Yeah but people can no longer make that connection

[@angreagach]

There is a hilarious example of the use of a strong "a" in an episode of the old comedy series "The Honeymooners," where Art Carney and Jackie Gleason use it, saying, "can it core a apple?"

[@sunwukong6897]

I imagine that the form of OE “ān” acting as an article developed weakly was because it acted proclitically, i.e. was unstressed and phonetically belonged to the segment of whatever word it modified.

[@jergarmar]

@@DrGeoffLindsey I must admit, the concept of a Lindsey video being "too long" is an unfamiliar concept to me, heh.

[@Thecognoscenti_1]

My favourite example of incorrect a/an usage is when Jeremy Clarkson deliberately uses the wrong form to draw attention to the object being emphasised ("an cow", "an horse", "an van", "a egg")

[@MaoRatto]

It razors and too hard to say. I notice that when I speak. Most words with n or m. If there is an N like in End. It is nasalized.

[@OrangeC7]

That tends to play in an interesting way with how sometimes you will see "an" used for words that start with (a non-silent) "h", like "an historic", which I remember noticing a lot when I watched Star Trek: Voyager as a kid.

[@WayneKitching]

The title almost gave me a hard attack!

[@mahiainti678]

good one

[@nate_storm]

lol Geoff let that JJ clip go for a while

[@baronmeduse]

I always find it amusing how French makes a big deal about inserting letters to avoid vowel clashes and then has things like 'en haut' (where the 'n' isn't even pronounced, or the h which is a vowel sound).

[@ReidMerrill]

That's an cool observation

[@arminhaberl9242]

Love it, love it, love it 😅

[@squidward5110]

Lmao canada man stresses every word

[@stevieinselby]

I like the fact that we have _the_ definite article because there's just the one, but we have _an_ indefinite article because there are two of them!

[@terdragontra8900]

that is delightful!

[@EnviedShadow]

This channel makes me so self-conscious about how I talk. I love it.

[@srmjo]

I'm glad you have touched on the use of "thuh" + glottal stop rather than "thee" + y before a noun starting with a vowel. I first became aware of it, in American speakers, a decade or so ago, and in the intervening time it seems (to me) to have spread like wildfire. We can now hear plenty of younger people in England, even BBC reporters, saying "thuh earth" and "thuh architect". Interesting that you situate this phenomenon as part of an increasing tendency of hard attack. 🙏

[@ericaceous1652]

Think the choice of example nouns in this video was not accidental, following that first video clip 😄

[@mplsmike4023]

Love the eigh’ English muffin example. Brings home why we should use careful, standard language when conversing with strangers.

[@JordynPi]

Funny how "hiatus" itself contains a hiatus

[@insectoid_creature]

not quite i don't think. it's pronounced hayeytus

[@hbowman108]

Most of us have a diphthongized PRICE vowel, so there's a glide. Some USAns have leveled it, and those DO have hiatus.

[@angreagach]

That depends on the dialect. In this case, the second element of the i actually acts as a consonantal y in most dialects!

[@BryanLu0]

It's autological!

[@michaelcherry8952]

When I and my siblings were young, my Mum posted alphabet cards around the walls of the basement to start us off on learning our letters. It backfired slightly with my older brother who insisted that "A is for NAPPLE" and "O is for Norange" as in "A Napple" and "A Norange". It took him a while to work out where the pause should be! I've found that all languages, but English in particular, tend to work on a consensus basis. When something becomes commonly used, it gradually becomes mainstream enough to become official. And then 5 years later the OED throws up its hands and says "All right, all right! We'll put it in!"😆 Although this is definitely egalitarian, it does lead to a lot of confusion and difficulties when people are learning English as a second language. Questions about "why is it said that way" are often met with a shrug by the teacher, who has no idea other than "we've always said it that way".

[@alicec1533]

God, I know I'm going to notice this everywhere now aren't I.

[@unknowndeoxys00]

So it's a linguistic phenomenon. I would usually associate it with script glitches in games or other software, or even by way of the software's design because who had the time to worry about grammar when coding. For example, a game I loved on Nintendo's Gameboy Advance involved a little baking section, and the concluding message for any successful bake was, "You made a ___ ___." To read "You made a Sugar Cookies" and "You made a Apple Strudel" was one of my favorite useless things to giggle at.

[@IHTACast]

I love your channel so much. You’ve quantified observations I’ve noted to myself I thought nobody else even noticed. However the more I watch your channel the more I hear people instead of listening to them LOL

[@Sinthoras155]

14:00 Imagine being Dr Lindsey, always on the lookout for linguistic anomalies. Even if you just want to create a Discord Server, you have to be on the lookout

[@cozykotatsu]

I love this channel so much😭💖

[@alicec1533]

Same! Always excited to see a new video... there's just a wealth of stuff that I likely hear all the time, or say myself all the time but never _notice_ until Geoff Lindsey makes a video about it.

[@NickHoad]

How do you manage to find such a large and diverse collection of clips of people exhibiting these details of speech you’re highlighting?

[@hbowman108]

I would guess that they're searching with Youglish.

[@TransNeingerian]

He finds a clip that has something interesting to make a video about first.

[@litigioussociety4249]

I've always been curious how he finds them too. He also is probably able to train himself to spot these things, because I would definitely miss them most of the time, even if I was looking for them. Vocal fry is about the only thing I can notice more, if I try.

[@hbowman108]

Probably with Youglish searches.

[@mack.attack]

I wonder if this occurs more in Hawai'i with how prevalent glottal stops are in Hawaiian words like Hawai'i, 'a'a, ka'a'awa etc

[@petermsiegel573]

Well, local people (locals) in Hawaii speak Hawaiian Pidgin for the most part, rather than Hawaiian (which is typically learned as a second language in immersion classes). In Pidgin, wan (

[@trevoro.9731]

Such tendency is specific to the particular speech transmission environment, or more precisely, adaptation across many popular environments to clearly identify the words apart and from other similar words. The extreme case of such is the accent of sailors aimed to keep the clear distinction of words when shouted over a large distance (with extremities of such representation expressed in Finnic languages) or some Italic/Spanish accents for communicating within very close personal space (face-to-face).

[@RubyRedDances]

I've found the I introduction of a+a word starting with a vowel to feel extremely auditorily uncomfortable. I always presumed the use of "an" like the liaison of French and it totally made sense to me.

[@Ringo-Starr]

Thank you for your keen insight and clear explanation!! I love the minutiae of the spoken word :)

[@hbowman108]

Time for more debate over whether J.J. McCullough has a strange voice or not. There's always the person that insists that nobody has that level of Canadian raising in "about". J.J. McCullough proves other people do it in HIS video on the accent. kzbin.info/www/bejne/boq3eJh_ppmjias

[@jaapsch2]

The repair “a, um, an …” is interesting (10:40). I do that, but find that with the definite article I use the “thee” pronunciation often when there is a slight pause in production, and then don’t repair. It irritates me when I record my videos, but I can’t help myself from saying it so often.

[@Mullkaw]

ill be sure to keep a eye on this development in the coming future!!

[@MikeOfKorea]

I enjoyed that sneaky bit.

[@notwithouttext]

satisfying how "to", "the", "do", and "a" can match up like this. the last part about how "a" can sound like "eight" also has a parallel, with "the" vs "that" mentioned in your t-glottaling video.

[@drendelous]

i broke my tongue looking at the thumbnail

[@mattj5772]

I've been noticing the trend for completely ignoring the distinction between A and AN in comment sections. I almost never see AN anymore... I dislike it.

[@Decopunk1927]

I was in New York a couple days ago and saw signs referencing "a uptown train" and "an downtown train"

[@borealmarinda4337]

I looked up "extreme marshmallow cannon" after hearing the example of Obama saying that to know the context, and the first link I found had "a extreme marshmallow cannon" written down. An immediate example of written form example of this development.

[@WoWTrygin]

Brilliant video! I find that using a long and stressed "a" and a pause makes it sound even more emphatic than using an emphatic "an" (to me). Perhaps it is an's dependence on the following word that diminishes the emphasis on its semantic importance. It is not just "án icon" it really is any given icon - just á icon. Some speakers seemingly do the same with "the" (using the "incorrect" allomorph to highlight its sementic importance). They might empasise the definitive nature of "That is the way to go" with "That is, theé, way to go". Some speakers also seem to do it when searching for the next word - as in "He took thee, um ...". Perhaps this is to resolve the hiatus between "the" and "um" or perhaps it easier to prolong "thee" than "the".

[@jBM7420]

As a Bangladeshi living in South Africa, that one section of the video felt as if it was calling me out.

[@johnmiller0000]

Crikey - what a scary way to start the video. Must be an Halloween prank!

[@BB-848-VAC]

Trumps the man

[@kellybennett1790]

Jump scare!

[@Vox-Multis]

Wait, do they call them English muffins in England? I always figured they just called them muffins.

[@overlordnat]

It’s rare for us to say ‘English muffins’, unless we want to be extremely clear that it’s not American muffins being discussed (we also normally just call both varieties ‘muffins’) but Geoff was probably quoting a non-English person in any case.

[@Vox-Multis]

@@overlordnat Ahh, good information. Thank you!

[@bugcake006]

As a person who's main language isn't English, I'm learning a lot from your videos. I have been practicing English for over a decade and never understood why there were two different ways to pronounce the word "the", and in which situation should I use one prononciation or the other.Thank you for your vids !

[@Aleiza_49]

I don't use hard attack in my dialect of English as far as I can tell. I always use 'an' before vowels and the 'thi' pronunciation before vowels.....it just sounds very odd to me when ppl don't do that. 😅

[@meiriongwril9696]

When we were in Louisiana (2000-2014) most of the students used 'a' and ðə before vowels - with glottal stops

[@PrincessTidge]

I love that you got a clip of Jon Richardson in there, the OG Nidiot 😂

[@JohnDBlue]

Huh. When you played the example of the man singing the end using the "wrong" type of the, it made sense to me. It fits in the song.

[@premodernist_history]

"the man singing". No one in particular. Just some random guy.

[@aarondyer.pianist]

@@premodernist_history Nobody

[@danielevillegas]

loved seeing JJ at 12:20

[@KingSejongTheGreatOfKorea]

Personally, I don't really mind "a" before words starting with a vowel and don't even notice it most of the time - with one exception: "a other" really irks me, possibly because it is more noticeable.

[@ICLHStudio]

My guess would be that that's related to the fact that "another" is a word on its own; and so instead of just slipping up in a minor grammatical rule (which is generally easy to overlook), it sounds like you are specifically mispronouncing a word (which is much more noticeable).

[@charlietizzardokevlahan3130]

Southern English speaker here in the 25 - 30 range I definitely do and have for a long time used the strong indefinite article 'a' consciously to express emphasis, for me I've noticed this happens whether the following word begins with a consonant or not. So for me I use a weak 'a' and 'an' in the normal way, but if I want to create emphasis I would use strong 'a' in every case.

[@danyalee777]

Thank you! I fee free to use A now!

[@alicec1533]

6:10 sounds like a Mondasian Cyberman

[@EmceeJoseph]

I never even knew about allomorphs other than a/an! Splendid!

[@WayneKitching]

As a South African, I thought about how an acquaintance once said "a idiot" with the schwa vowel. I was pleasantly surprised to hear some familiar accents in the examples.

[@keir92]

Very interesting, and another thing to watch out for accidentally saying. I'm firmly in the camp of saying a and an as well as bother forms of the.

[@Huntracony]

I noticed one clip being played for longer than you ordinarily would to analyse its language, and I was very entertained by that. Also, he made a great point.

[@daruddock]

I appreciated it too.

[@Marbejablah]

Needed the palate cleanser after showing the cheeto man

[@pooroldnostradamus]

Clarkson was ahead of his time.

[@letMeSayThatInIrish]

Thanks for letting J.J. McCullough complete a few sentences of advice for the election😄

[@chrisharvey5397]

Careful though, his "Canadian accent" is sounds pretty fake, that is, it is how Americans think we talk, not how we do. For example, His use of [ʉw] in 'about' is done for comic effect. Canadians would use either [əw] or [ɛw] for Canadian raising. He is not consistent, and usually says [ɛw] in words other than 'about' and 'around'

[@nutherefurlong]

14:17 Emphasis on the indefinite a makes it sound like ay, which like an can connect to the following vowel easier than just the a might. Doesn't work for all vowels as easily as an does, though The example at 14:36 seems odd to me because it seems to lack an article further on in the statement. Shouldn't be THE app? To me it more suggested a lack of mastery of articles generally Often I've noticed my own speech patterns in these videos but some of the alterations that happens when articles meet words genuinely surprised me. Was fun, thank you

[@mags102755]

Dr. Geoff. Fascinating stuff. I had no idea about the glottal stop coming so much into use. Glottal stops are hard on the larynx in the physical sense. I wonder about how more use of glottal stops will affect the larynx in the future. Thanks!

[@devononair]

Oh dear, this is really going to bug me now!

[@ArturoSubutex]

0:43 "a moron - an idiot"... Given the person that was shown at the very start of the video, this example seems particularly apt.

[@josephalbatross5961]

Only a mentally healthy person would comment this.

[@revangerang]

Oh deer, 🦌that last example is unfortunate hahaha. I suspect that if this sort of usage becomes more common, we will get around this problem by merely verifying the speaker's intent, as we do with other homophones.

[@Yassinius]

Your videos are such nice little tidbits on linguistic developments that I'm totally not aware of. I love the copious amounts of recent examples that you give to exemplify each sound. Do linguists write papers on this specific language developments?

[@thatotherted3555]

Ah yes, Oscar winner Anne Icon. I do like her work.

[@angreagach]

I never even noticed that "to" and "do" had two pronunciations. If I'm correct in my analysis of my own speech, I find that I might or might not use the "weak" pronunciation of "to" before a word beginning with an accented vowel, but not an unaccented one ("təʔ" end or "tʉw" end, but "tʉw" eliminate (only)). For "do," I only use "dʉw" before any vowel. I consistently use "an" and "ðij" before vowels. (I'm from New York, but my New York accent is extremely light (I'm mostly rhotic, for example).)

[@tjosiahhaynes]

That is an interesting development

[@Wizzyhatg]

At ~ 9:00 , a bunch of the clips are specifically "a African" - maybe using that form so often and wanting to protect the start of "African" influenced the entire dialect

[@annette6420]

I’ll have a hours sleep please

[@vandrar3n]

I always thought that American pronunciation of "a" that was completely absent in my English classes felt way more adequate to completely replace the "an". I guess this tracks.

[@jemleye]

Loved the examples in this one. Especially one of the latter ones was very enlightening ;)

[@brassen]

"A Owl?"

[@zzzaphod8507]

Interesting editing at 12:12 to 12:35

[@GandalfTheGay98]

It was clearly intentional. It would be nice to watch a video about one of my interests without having politics shoved down my throat.

[@mylittledashie7419]

​@@GandalfTheGay98 Good lord, this was about as subtle as it could possibly be, just say you don't like that he disagrees with you because this wasn't even close to "shoving it down your thoat".

[@zzzaphod8507]

Seemed like an coincidence, to be sure

[@freeenergymachineforsale9751]

5:24 I think she even uses a glottal stop before "logo"

[@apeters8]

This video drove me crazy. I just could not stand this happening over and over again. Intereestingly, my aversion to different "incorrect" usages of a/an differed greatly depending on the word following. "a other" sounded truly awful while "a African" was offputting, but much much less so.

[@everydayispoetry]

"A moron" and "an idiot". Gee, I wonder who, five days before the US election, he could have been thinking of to make him choose those examples? Maybe the speaker who opens the video?

[@radupopescu9977]

There are languages which have sentences formed only by vowels. Like this one: Oaia aia e a ei. (and others sentences in Romanian). Translation: That ship is hers. Another one: Eu ii iau ei oua. Translation: I take her eggs.

[@scvcebc]

With increasing use of AI to interpret speech, I predict a lot more deliveries of eight items instead of one!

[@vvvvaaaacccc]

rationally I'm not a prescriptivist but in practice I just hate the use of "a" before vowels. edit: this video is so upsetting 😂

[@aarondyer.pianist]

10:15 explains 0:00

[@mihaihorezeanu43]

I wonder if this hard attack in regard to the indefinite article will eventually affect its spelling and enrich the English lexicon with something like to drop one's n's, perhaps. 😉

[@mariaj.victoriaarcelagos3218]

11:39 OMG it's Morgan Donner ❤

[@msjsr9364]

That's an... interesting graphic at 11:19 lmao

[@trevoro.9731]

Can anyone here explain how it feels when the foreigner start omitting the articles altogether ? I personally can consciously switch them on/off, as I don't think in English. The practice shows that the other party can still understand everything perfectly.

[@AndreiBerezin]

Everything will be understood perfectly. These two unnecessary shreds of speech will disappear sooner or later

[@deutschermichel5807]

​@AndreiBerezin are you sure? English is a very analytical language. of an under a over a from a to an etc.

[@OrangeDog20]

It feels like they don't know English very well. Does your native language have gendered noun inflections? How does it feel when a foreign speaker just ignores/guesses them all?

[@filipinojalapeno1527]

​@@AndreiBerezin the definite and indefinite articles have been around for about 1000 years and we havent stopped using them so i doubt theyll disappear any time soon

[@AndreiBerezin]

@filipinojalapeno1527 they were present in my language and they're nowhere to be found here for the last like 2000 years maybe. The same will happen in English eventually. Ancient tools never last forever.

[@allthatinformation]

This is 8 amazing video!

[@Paul71H]

6:03 I've noticed this a lot over the past few years, where younger KZbinrs avoid using weak forms. My son watches one particular LEGO KZbinr who almost always pronounces "the" as THEE, and "a" as "AY". I suspect that these KZbinrs talk this way in an attempt to sound more formal or intelligent, but that's not how they sound to me. To me, this weak form avoidance makes them sound robotic. In fact, this speech pattern reminds me of an elementary school student reading aloud in class, and doing it badly -- having to slow down and read one word at a time. So this speech pattern gives me the impression that the speaker is reading (poorly) from a script that he's not familiar with.

[@minirop]

FInally, a youtuber I know about: Paul from Lang Focus

[@bjrockensock]

I can hear from my dialect the use of both forms, oddly; it must be dying or I have two distinct dialects (educated vs colloquial?) competing for preeminence. That word preeminence with its double 'e begs the question why do I say "preyeminence" rather than "pre(eminence"? And why is it when we use numbers (one egg = wa negg, two eggs = to(eggs, three yeggs) we ellide the sounds even if we drop them in dialect speech. Having taught English to foreign speakers, I needed to enunciate for clarity which added a lot of glottal sounds and gaps where there would be none in more normal speech. Also, AN HISTORY versus a history--few Americans, to my ear, would ever say "an history".

[@Donut-Eater]

I was just wondering about this with some of ny friends yesterday!

[@jergarmar]

Interesting... I understood your "the" usage, but when you got to "to", I definitely do NOT say "too-wend". So if I start a sentence with "to start this" or "to end this", I tend to glottal-stop it, and say "t' start this" (or even "ts' tart this") and "t' end this". I grew up in California, BTW. And as an aside, have you had a video about weak forms stealing letters off the words that follow them? Like in my example, "to start" turning into "ts' tart"?

[@frankdrebinn]

5:59 Based

[@bob___]

a nadder => an adder

[@jayjeckel]

2:30 I've listened to this part over a dozen times and I simply do not hear any difference between the two pronunciations of "do". In both cases it sounds to me like you're saying "dew you" and "dew I".

[@TheUnlocked]

Try setting it to 0.25 speed and it might be clearer. The schwa is very weak and very short, but it is different from the full "dew you".

[@kala_asi]

d'you. doo why

[@jayjeckel]

@@TheUnlocked Thanks, that's a good idea, I'll give it a try when I get some free time later.

[@lilcrowlet1802]

I'm am still baffled by how many different examples of speech you seem to be able to find around the internet, how do you do this? Do you ask around on your discord for examples of a specific phenomenon or are you just a very fanatic watcher of youtube videos?

[@KevinWMoor]

From The Perishers, in the Daily Mirror, decades ago: A norse. Another rorse :)

[@frenzalrhomb6919]

"Strings of consonants together" . . . The Welsh : - "Hold my beer" 🍺

[@PettyIfTrue]

A lot of Welsh sounds like the hiatus noise to me 1:24

[@brennanclement8582]

Not sure why, but "a interesting" stood out much less to me than any of the other examples. I wonder if that's something I use or hear a lot.

[@Sonny_McMacsson]

Potato potanto

[@Alan_Clark]

There is an annoying advert that I have been forced to see before watching KZbin videos which begins with the words "A' Amazon...". I wonder if this is related?

[@AquaMoye]

12:10 Methinks you might have wanted to share his message. Good on you.

[@otherperson]

Man, people really have to think carefully before they choose what to call African Americans, huh? Lol half the pauses seemed to be people thinking of a more appropriate word than "black" or something. Black people are okay with black yall lol dont worry. And lots of black people in the US aren't African-American anyway so it's usually more apt.

[@hankkingsley2792]

Do "an other" and "another" both coexist? Casual, young speech seems to be shifting -- even beyond times where they do the "a other" thing. Which would screw up the ability to distinguish "I was kicked out of another Burger King" (yet again, it keeps happening to me!) and "I was kicked out of an other Burger King" (a different one than the one you and I were talking about)

[@kori228]

clips are getting quite a bit political, not a fan

[@gambalombo]

Is there any difference in technical use/definition between "a" and "an"?

[@kennethray8473]

Nope! As mentioned, they’re both forms of the same word, the indefinite article.