Minh Nguyen wrote: > Usually "an" comes before a word that starts with a vowel, i.e a, e, > i, o, u. So one would say "an eight o'clock meeting" or "an 8 o'clock > meeting". More examples: an amphibian, an egg, an igloo, an octopus, > an umbrella. However, there are situations when this rule doesn't > apply. In software engineering, one uses UML diagrams as part of the > design process. Although this acronym starts with a capital "u", it's > pronounced and written as "a UML diagram" not "an UML diagram", just > as in "a ewe" not "an ewe".
In American English at least (I just don't know about other varieties) it is typical to change some vowels into diphthongs, in particular to change initial u into iu instead. In iu, i acts as a semivowel, and it's typical to use the article "a" in front of a word beginning with iu, e.g. a unicorn. But e.g. "urn" doesn't have the initial semivowel, so the article is "an", so "an urn". The other semivowel (there might be still others, but I can't think of them at the moment) is w as in "one". As with semivocalic i, the article for semivocalic w is "a", e.g. a one-time deal. In all varieties of English, there is a pretty broad gulf between orthography and pronunciation. (I don't know if the orthography was fixed ages ago and pronunciation continued to evolved, or if they were never really aligned to begin with.) In a fantasy world, you would see that urn has a different initial letter than unicorn, but for now you just have to listen to the pronunciation to figure out the appropriate article. Sorry for garbling up all of linguistics here. I'm sure there are others who can do a better job. Robert Dodier --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
