Gamer girl here. I'm Minion Fogriti and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, roles, and other cool stuff. This

week we'll talk about why we have both the word A and the word An and a whole bunch of

other weird pronouns and about how the word lonely used to mean something different

from what it means today. Last week I talked about how words such as

Adder, Aprin, and Umpire originally began with the letter N which was lost when phrases

such as a Nader, a Naprin, and a Nome pair were rebracted as an Adder and Aprin and an

Umpire. I also talked about how nouns such as nickname and notch originally didn't begin

with N but gained one when phrases such as an Eek name and an Ock were rebracted into

a nickname and a notch. All these changes were possible because the indefinite article

has two forms A and An. In addition to these common nouns I talked about how some proper

nouns such as NED and NEL were created when the affectionate phrases, Mine Ed and Mine

Ellen, underwent similar rebracting. If you go back a step though you start to wonder

why we have these alternative forms A and An and My and Mine that led to the rebracting.

And why do we still say for example an Apple instead of a Apple when we don't say Mine

Apple instead of My Apple of the two forms of the indefinite article An is the older

one. According to the Oxford English Jictionary it comes from the Old English word for one which

was pronounced something like An. However when the word wasn't stressed the A vowel was

shortened so that An was pronounced more or less as An as it still is today when we're

not talking about it as a word like I am here, An Apple. Unlike today though An was

used before words beginning with vowels and words beginning with consonants. The form

A which is what we now used before consonant sounds came about as a phonetic simplification.

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