Re: "A" and "an" articles in front of words

On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 05:23:31PM +0900, Gon=E7alo C. Justino wrote:
>=20
> does different pronunciation comes from the subsequent  letters ? i'm
> thinking uMBrella, uNCle, uRGengt, uNDer, uGLy, uPPer, uRGe but uNIcorn,
> eULogy (or is this "an eulogy"? now i'm confused)... i'm wondering if two
> consonants make it "an" and at least one vowel make in "a". Maybe I'm just
> ramblingm, this sounds so un-rubyesque :S

You're right about unicorn and eulogy.  I'm interested in checking out
the correlation between second-and-third letters and vowels that become
consonants in pronunciation now, to see how strong a correlation that is.
I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to these perceived rules, though, in
any case.

It seems likely that, most often, you'd get the following results, where
V means "vowel" and C means "consonant".  Lower case letters are
literals.  In each case, two adjacent vowels are assumed to be
*different* vowels.

    uCC: treat as vowel
    uCV: treat as consonant
    VVC: treat as consonant
    yC: treat as vowel
    yV: treat as consonant

These are only my immediate impressions, so far.  Assuming for argument's
sake that they're correct for the general case, though, there would
almost certainly be exceptions for every one of these correlations, and
the question that arises then is whether the exceptions are rare enough
to warrant using these correlations as rules with a set of exceptions
used to override them, or numerous enough for it to make more sense to
just use an extensive dictionary to handle such matters.

If I get really bored, I may put together a really extensive dictionary
to cover this, then use it to determine the strength of such
correlations some day (or week or month), but not today.

--=20
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]