Hi Simon, On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 9:46 PM, Simon King<simon.k...@nuigalway.ie> wrote:
<SNIP> > 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"). It's written "a Unix machine" which mirrors the way it is spoken, i.e. "a you-nix machine". Same thing goes for "one"; one writes "a one-man band" because it's pronounced as "a won-man band". Most of the time, the choice of "a" or "an" depends on the pronunciation which takes higher precedence over whether or not the first letter is a vowel or a consonant. > What do > natives think? So, isn't it only about the vowels a,e,i, after all? Pronunciation rules! :-) We say "a you-logy" and write "a eulogy"; the written form usually follows the spoken form. As for an algorithm you seek, here's a heuristic for using "an": one- and two-digit numbers: 8, 11, 18, 80-89 numbers with >= 3 digits: 8xxx...x where "x" is a digit As you know, "a" and "an" are used when we refer to an object or thing from a collection of objects/things or when we're not being specific about the object/thing; e.g. "an apple from a barrel". For all you care, there might be only one apple in the barrel. If the object/thing is unique, then we use "the". This immediately does away with the usage problems caused by "a" and "an", for then we are being specific about what we're talking about. Using "the" also conveys the extra information that there is only one such object; it's unique. -- Regards Minh Van Nguyen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
