Hi Simon, 2009/8/29 Simon King <simon.k...@nuigalway.ie>: > > Hi Minh, > > On Aug 29, 12:32 pm, Minh Nguyen <nguyenmi...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Minh Nguyen<nguyenmi...@gmail.com> wrote: > [...] >> And we do this: "a one" not "an one", even though "one" starts with a vowel. > > Ah, that confirms my feeling towards "an one-cochain". > > And I have a similar aversion against "an Unix machine" (without > intention to offend Unix, but I would say "a Unix machine"). What do > natives think? So, isn't it only about the vowels a,e,i, after all?
I am not a native speaker, but I believe that the following is the case and the cause of the problem (see also Adam's post): The question of a vs an depends on the pronounciation of the word not the way the word is written. And as you point out, this can go either way. For example, since "Unix" is not pronounced with a starting vowel, "a Unix" should be correct, thus also "a one" as Minh said. For numbers, it could be problematic for those starting with 1: a 1, an 11 (an eleven), a 111 (a one hundred ... ), a 1111 (a one thousand ...), an 11111 (an eleven thousand ...). Hope this is correct. Best wishes, Wolfgang > > Cheers, > Simon > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
