Date: Mon, 25 Mar 96 11:06:28 MET From: Greg Lehey <lehey.pad@sni.de> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <199603251009.LAA29861@nixpbe.pdb.sni.de> In-Reply-To: <22389.827542080@time.cdrom.com>; from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Mar 22, 96 4:48 pm
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> > [Redirected to -chat since I don't think that the CVS committers particularly > want to join in what could be a protracted grammatical discussion :-)] Ah! A lingusitic discussion. Just what I like. You'll be sorry :-) >> Now, the first draft of my Phd was returned with a big red message saying >> "a unit, not an unit!". Now I was a little peeved about this since my > > FWIW, I've never seen "an unit" used anywhere on this side of the > pond. Our english teacher taught us (way back in the late 70's) that > `an' be used in front of words starting a, e, i or o. We never > learned it as a general rule for vowels (especially since u and > sometimes y fit that category, and you'd never say "an uniform" or "an > yankee"). That's a strange way to describe a relatively simple rule. Consider that the indefinite article in just about any language that has them is identical to the word for 'one'. It was in English, too, once upon a time. Thus, 'an' is really the normal form, and 'a' is an abbreviation. It got dropped in front of consonants. The question is not how you spell a word following an indefinite article, it's how you pronounce it. Most people pronounce 'unit' with a leading consonantal y, so it should be 'a unit'. Most people pronounce 'unpleasant' with a leading consonantal 'a', so it should be 'an unpleasant discovery'. The same applies for 'hotel'. Aspirate the h, and it's 'a hotel'. Drop the h, and it's 'an hotel'. > So if times they-are-a-changin' then perhaps only in the UK, since > "an unit" has _always_ been considered incorrect over here, at least > since I was in grade school. The times *are* a-changing in the UK. The pronounciation of the language has been changing for the past 500 years, and there's no evidence that it's done yet. Grreg
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