Some teachers blindly teach (and pupils blindly learn) the rule that the indefinite article an should be used before all nouns beginning in vowels.
This needs to be qualified: an is used before nouns beginning in vowel sounds — so the rule applies to pronunciation rather than spelling.
New Paper columnist Santokh Singh gets only one out of five attempts above (27 November 2008) right — a Eurasian, because the noun begins /ju/ and not in a vowel. Either he doesn’t know the correct rule or he pronounces Eurasian wrongly.
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