From: "Gonçalo C. Justino" <goncalo.justino@...>
Date: 2011-11-09T22:10:23+09:00
Subject: Re: "A" and "an" articles in front of words

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google hasn't helped: does anyone have or know of a "complete" list of
english words ?

On 8 November 2011 17:20, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 05:23:31PM +0900, Gon=C3=A7alo C. Justino wrote:
> >
> > 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 t=
wo
> > 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.
>
> --
> Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
>

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