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I'm confused by the sentences "-What's this? -It's V."in our textbook.As I know, letters are countable, right? But why there isn't a "a" in front of the"V"?Shouldn't it be "It's a V."? enter image description here

In the meantime, there are exercises in our exercise books like: There's ___ F in the alphabet.

A.a B. an C./

And the answer to the question is "an".

And then I saw such an exercise: This is ___V. A. a B. an C. /
I think both A and C are acceptable.

Those really confuse me.Hope to get your answers soon. Thanks a lot!

p.s. I know that F is headed with the vowel [e] so the article should be 'an' while if it's a consonant it should be an 'a'.I'm just confused if an article should be used or not.

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Yes letters are countable. But thy can also be thought of as abstract ideals with names:

This is V. V is a consonant. This is W which looks like two Vs put together.

Still in most contexts "It's a V" would be better than "It's V". Honestly I think the problem here is with the textbook, or rather I suspect that, since I haven't seen the text.

As for the choice between "a" and "an" when an article is to be used, this follows the usual rule. When the next sound is a vowel, use "an" otherwise "a". Thus: "It's a V" but "It's an A". Note that this depends on the sound, not the spelling, and thus can vary in different dialects.

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  • It's a V because we say 'vee' and the sound starts with a consonant, but it's an F because we say 'eff' which starts with a vowel sound.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 28, 2021 at 15:48
  • Yes. We can equally well say 'Bed starts with B.' and 'Bed starts with a B.'
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 28, 2021 at 15:51
  • @Michael Woke Harvey I added A vs An to the answer. I had thought of the issue as 'article vs no article'. Thanks for the comments.
    – David Siegel
    Commented Dec 28, 2021 at 16:22
  • Thanks David, for your answer. I was thinking the same about an abstract ideal. So when I encountered with the following exercise: This is ___V. A. a B. an C. / I was thinking that there must be sth wrong with it. I have uploaded the photo of the textbook for your reference. Hope you can see it cause it doesn't show on my computer now. Maybe it's the network problem.
    – Ayden
    Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 5:02

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