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Grammar help!
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
Just quickly:
Would I write "an unique" or "a unique"? Both sound odd.
Is it the same as in "an historian" or just normal?
ETA Microsoft Word spellchecker is telling me it's 'a' but it's wrong so often that I don't quite believe it!
Would I write "an unique" or "a unique"? Both sound odd.
Is it the same as in "an historian" or just normal?
ETA Microsoft Word spellchecker is telling me it's 'a' but it's wrong so often that I don't quite believe it!
0
Comments
What's the rest of the sentence?
xsazx - it's definitely "an historian", they just tell you about the following consonant thing in primary school to help you out a bit, it's actually more complicated. It's the sound rather than the spelling that matters, if you say it, yoo-neek it's a consonant.
You know when you look at something for so long that it doesn't make any sense at all? Yeah, it's like that!
Also, 500 words? What is WITH that? I need far more! :razz:
A unique occurence. - sounds so right.
Assessment is now done, woohoo. Time for cake :birthday:
"A European" is another one.
<a> goes before consonants, <an> goes before vowels.
In the case of 'unique', although it begins orthgraphically with a <u>, phonetically it begins with a /j/, which isn't a vowel, it's a voiced palatal approximant (I know you know what this means KHSS .
It's the same with 'historian'. If it's realised with a voiced glottal fricative /h/, then normally it would be with <a> (cause it's before a consonant). But if it's h-deleted (like in London accents), then <historian> would begin with a vowel, and the article would be <an>.
Oh, and formants? Guessing you're doing acoustic phonetics right now? Mmm, so much fun!
I love being able to understand everything you just said there.
I was really struggling with acoustic phonetics until I read a chapter by Ladefoged and now everything is clear and lovely. The course we're doing is Phonological Variation and Change, and we've just been given our big projects to do. I think I am going to look at t-glottaling in a Newcastle dialect, and comparing style or gender. The best part is that we don't have to collect our own data, as we are using the EViE corpus.
I have ear training tomorrow, a whole hour of making noises. GREAT fun
More than odd... just sounds completly wrong. Must depends how it's pronounced.
I read 'unique' as 'antique' several times in confusion... I must be really tired :rolleyes:
Your topic sounds really interesting. I'm trying to think who's worked on Newcastle English. Paul Foulkes has written an article on t-glottaling in Newcastle. You can get it http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~pf11/ICPhS99-glottals.pdf
Gender and style are intimately related. If you want to go down that route you definitely need to read Penny Eckert's work, esp. her stuff with Sally McConnell-Ginet (it's called 'Think Practically and Look Locally: Gender as a Practice-based Practice') If your uni is a member of JSTOR (which it should be through ATHENS), you can get it online http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0084-6570(1992)2%3A21%3C461%3ATPALLL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U
What's the EViE corpus?
If you need anything else, give us a bell
The EViE corpus is "International Variation in English" Clicky
And thanks!