There is a Canadian joke that is related to this very thing:
Where did the Québécois get that H sound for Ottawa?
They took it out of here.
When speaking with a French Canadian accent, Ottawa sounds like Hottawa, and Here sounds like Ear. There is a similar more adult-oriented joke about the word Happiness. It is utterly baffling to Anglophones, especially since whatever rule they are following doesn't apply to the word Ontario, which pretty much sounds the same as in English.
If you've never heard Quebec French, imagine Celine Dion telling the joke and you'll get it.
The Happiness joke is based both on the missing H and the different emphasis on syllables, so you are probably right or at least close. The subtraction of H in words like Here and Happiness seems like a different rule than its addition on hard vs soft initial-O words, though.
"An Nvidia engineer" would actually be grammatically correct here, since the pronunciation of "Nvidia" starts with a vowel sound and not a consonant one. It's the pronunciation of the word that matters for a/an, not the spelling.
In case anybody was wondering, the official pronunciation of the word "Nvidia" is apparently "en-VID-eeyah" [1].
I didn't know that, I always got told it depends on the first letter (and it didn't make sense for me for some words).. (Obviously not a native speaker)
Wait, what? So the rule isn't that the pronunciation starts with a vowel sound? Instead it's a more murky thing about how easy it rolls off the tongue?
University starts with the 'y' sound, hence "a university." On the other hand, "an unimpressive fact" uses "an" because "unimpressive" starts with the 'u' (vowel) sound.
That’s why the pronunciation of “an history” is such a contentious issue in British political linguistics to this day. Crucially, as has been observed correctly, the rule is that one should use the appropriate indefinite article. That in turn depends on whether one pronounces, as pirates, or has a silent ‘h’, revealing one’s origins even once the guise of Received Pronunciation had been defensively adopted.
I've always assumed that you use "an" whenever a noun starts with a vowel sound, which "Nvidia" does ("n" being pronounced as "en"), thus making "an Nvidia" the grammatically correct one.
This is actually a deeper issue about the confusion between the language itself (english phonology requires what you're describing) and the written form. No english speaker in the world, unexposed to the written form of "Nvidia" would ever say "A Nvidia."
That entirely depends on how you pronounce "nvidia" in your head. I can imagine someone who has never heard the name spoken out loud think of it as "ni-vidia" (I have done worse) and "a Nividia" is easier than "an Nividia"
That's just weird over-correction. "A historic day" is correct but for some reason people heard "An historic day" and the idea spread that it was a special exception.
Kind of like how you see lots of people on Reddit saying "water isn't wet, it just makes other things wet". They heard someone else say it and it sounds smart so they repeat it, without spending 10 seconds to look it up in a dictionary.
To me it may be a tell for the writers at one point pronouncing it as "'istoric", similar to those who say human as "'uman", and then as you said likely fanning out as an over-correction, possibly because that dialect was associated with prestige.
Titles with character length limitations do create tension that pulls sentence construction toward concise information density over strict readability, but avoiding unintended implicit statements in titles is a concern of mine.
This usage is acceptable because if you simply delete the word nvidia, we lose valuable context which tells us why we should pay attention to this post over any other engineer’s post with analogous drivers for this use case: the pedigree of the engineer suggests that the driver will be performant and of a similar quality as those other drivers produced by the engineer’s company.
