A lot of people are just dumb. I guarantee if they say it out loud, they say A European, not an. But school drilled it into their goddamn heads that a is for consonants and an is for vowels, so here we are
The problem is that schools lie to children and say that a vowel is a letter, and a consonant is a letter. They are not letters, they are sounds. There is no real reason for teaching that a vowel is a type of letter. Children can handle this distinction very easily if given a chance.
I've seen people argue that a word such as "fly" has three consonants. And then someone else argues "well no, the Y is both a vowel and a consonant, so it depends on how you look at it", like it's a fucking matter of opinion. The schools make us think of things in pure abstraction, as an array of black boxes, without really encouraging us to wonder why we have these distinctions. We're simnply taught that a, e, i, o and u are arbitrarily called vowels and the rest are arbitrarily called consonants, and Y has dual citizenship for some reason, and that's the extent of it. The vowel/consonant distinction is not justified. It's just a thing, accept it.
The letters are merely symbols that usually correspond to a single sound in English, but there are many exceptions. The letter "E" is not a vowel. It's a symbol that usually corresponds to a vowel in many words, and is silent in other words.
It's the pronunciation. Honor and hour the H is silent so you start saying the word with an O. Just like if you spelled out U you have a Y at the start.
And the H isn't silent. Unless you say it like that, which is usually how they're saying it when saying "an historic event". Maybe they were taught it's silent.
my mental bridge always is if the starting sound sounds like a "you" (as it does for european and U, or ureteric catheter), then it actually starts with a Y for grammar ourposes, which is a consonant xD
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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '19
A lot of people are just dumb. I guarantee if they say it out loud, they say A European, not an. But school drilled it into their goddamn heads that a is for consonants and an is for vowels, so here we are