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In English, "a" changes to "an" before a vowel or a silent "h". Is there any other language where the article changes its form depending on whether it precedes a consonant sound or a vowel sound?

I have found another similar question but that is a more general version of the question asking:

Are there other languages that change the indefinite or definite article based on what the following word sounds like?

Here, I only want to know which languages change articles according to vowels and consonants?

Arunabh Bhattacharya
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4 Answers4

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Yiddish shows an exact parallel to the English indefinite article.

The indefinite article is אַן an before a vowel and אַ a before a vowel.

Yiddish is a West Germanic language like English, but seeing as both languages have closer relatives without this alternation this must be a parallel development rather than shared inheritance.

Tristan
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  • Honestly hard to say. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were common to all West Germanic to do this in the spoken dialects unless being emphatic. The thing is that Modern Standard German and Dutch are a bit artificial and relatively new. – Adam Bittlingmayer Dec 12 '23 at 14:00
  • @AdamBittlingmayer its absence in Old English (and earlier Middle English) and Old High German is the main reason it can't be a shared inheritance. The fact that Frisian and (most) dialects on the Dutch-Low-German-High-German continuum mostly rules out an areal change. The fact most of the Continental West Germanic continuum also generally has glottal stops at the start of all "vowel-initial" words also makes the conditioning environment somewhat tricky – Tristan Dec 12 '23 at 14:18
  • Yeah true, I use a glottal stop in e.g. e Aff or e Esel – Adam Bittlingmayer Dec 12 '23 at 15:54
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Welsh does a similar thing, though with the definite article rather than the indefinite (which Welsh doesn’t have). In fact, the Welsh article uses a tripartite system:

  • Before a vowel sound (including /j/ and /h/, but not /w/), the form is yr: yr ergyd ‘the shot/blow’, yr haul ‘the sun’, yr iawn ‘the right/compensation’
  • Before a consonant sound (excluding /j/ and /h/), the form is y: y calon ‘the heart’, y wawr ‘the dawn’
  • After a vowel, the form is always ’r, regardless of what the following word starts with; this is written with no preceding space: o’r blaen ‘before’ (literally ‘from the front [of]’), mae’r tyndra yn esgyn ‘the tension is rising’
Janus Bahs Jacquet
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In Ancient Greek, an article ending in a vowel can merge with a word starting with a vowel, in a phenomenon called "crasis" (κρᾶσις). This doesn't happen before a consonant.

For example, ὁ ἀνήρ > ἁνήρ "the man" (ho anēr > hanēr), but ὁ πόλεμος "the war" (ho polemos).

Draconis
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The Hungarian definite article a changes to az before a vowel:

a szék “the chair”
az asztal “the table”

Yellow Sky
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