Barrie England

11 This question already has answers here: Closed 8 years ago. Possible Duplicate: When should I use “a” versus “an” in front of a word beginning with the letter h? Why do we say an historical but a history? This question was originally posed by @shanselman . asked Nov 2 '11 at 21:24 AmrAmr 21911 gold badge22 silver badges55 bronze badges 11 I have a theory about this.

So, the f->v shift can be traced back to Old English, where v wasn't its own letter, but merely an allophone of f. The /v/ pronunciation was used when it was placed between vowels or voiced consonants, and the /f/ pronunciation was used otherwise. So the declination from wīf to wīfes meant that the actual pronunciation of the f went from /f/ to /v/ (much like today today), because it became positioned between two voiced vowels (I should point out, in OE wīfes was a two-syllable word [wiːvɛs]).

In my experience/dialect, you use translate into when you are talking about the target language, but you can optionally use translate to when you are talking about the target text (the specific equivalent for the piece of original text you're talking about). For example, all of these are acceptable: (1) I translated "I like cats" into Spanish.