Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 18:08:03 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) Cc: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk, fenner@parc.xerox.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <22838.827546883@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 22 Mar 1996 17:26:00 PST." <199603230126.RAA10970@sunrise.cs.berkeley.edu>
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> Hmm. I always thought it's the pronounciation. If a `u' is > pronounced like a `you', as in `unit' (`you-knit'), it's a consonant, > and if it's pronounced like a weak `a', it's treated as a vowel as far > as articles are concerned. > > What about `an unpleasent experience'? Do you say `a' here? I think that words like `unpleasant' are a special case given that they're pronounced differently (you don't say "yoon-pleasant" unless you're from Scotland, and then nobody can understand your english anyway so it doesn't really matter). That's the key here, I think. If the starting `u' is *pronounced* like a `u' (yoo) then you say `a'. If its pronounced like `ah' or `uh' or something similar then the other rule kicks in. Don't forget, this is not so much a _grammatical_ rule that follows the lines of the alphabet, this is a *pronounciation* rule derived from the fact that saying things like "a apple" just doesn't roll off the tongue very well. Nobody ever said that english was a language that made much sense, hell, it's a walking card-catalog of special cases. It's often a matter of great wonder to me that non-native speakers learn it at all! Jordan
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