Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 14:13:34 +0200 (EET) From: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Satoshi Asami <asami@cs.berkeley.edu>, p.richards@elsevier.co.uk, fenner@parc.xerox.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960323140710.20093A-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee> In-Reply-To: <22838.827546883@time.cdrom.com>
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Eat good food, preserve nature, be nice to all nice people :) On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > > 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! > It isn't actually at all hard to learn - the trick allways is speak so that it sounds nice to your ears. That they you can get almost all of the grammar right (except for the commas). And there really aren't that many special cases (I haven't yet found out how you make sure from which gender a given word is other than learning by heart). Perhaps you should consider hard languages in which there are 14 or more cases. > Jordan > Sander
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