"an" one byne bill

Yeah, I admit I used an online dictionary for "dumb". I knew the other two though!
 
Vilurum said:
Yeah, I admit I used an online dictionary for "dumb". I knew the other two though!
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My post was just showing that you do indeed know everything, not anything malicious.







(When talking with you, I try to make sure that everything is grammatically correct. I don't want to be on the receiving end of a correction, because word on the street is that they hurt)
 
I told you!
 
Lucki said:
My post was just showing that you do indeed know everything, not anything malicious.







(When talking with you, I try to make sure that everything is grammatically correct. I don't want to be on the receiving end of a correction, because word on the street is that they hurt)
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QFT!! >.<
 
btw, thanks for the link. Much better then most auto-translation softwares I've found. Not necessarily better, but it has some languages most don't, such as Latin (god damn, the number of horrible latin translators out there is huge)
 
One would wonder if Vil pays that much attention to sentences such as previously stated, how bad is the board's English in general.


I already know I'm guilty of run-on sentences and subject-verb agreement as well as tenses. ~_~;
 
Halifirien said:
The "o" in "one" is a vowel letter, but the actual sound for "one" begins as a consonant ("w"), so you use "a." You wouldn't say "an win" or "an walrus."
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But I say an hero :(
 
Vilurum said:
Lamiae is the plural of Lamia, and is pronounced "LAH me eye" (with the singular "LAH me uh" - the first consonant is not to be pronounced "lay" in any case). There are also some singular Lamiae out there called Lamie instead of Lamia. I'm not sure whether this is an actual distinction or simply a translation, spelling, or typographic goof. (See who knows *how* many months of Troll Besieged before they spelled Gurfurlur right in the intro.)

As for a vs. an, the correct usage is based on phonetics (i.e. sound, pronunciation), not spelling. If the following sound, not necessarily letter, is a vowel, then you use "an". If the following sound, not necessarily letter, is a consonant (or more accurately, "not a vowel" - there are some weird in-between things), then you use "a". This is, of course, English, so there are exceptions, not to mention ongoing changes to pronunciation.

"Historic" is a quasi-exception - if you pronounce it on its own, the H is clearly pronounced, but you say "an historic blahblah" not "a historic blahblah", and when preceded by "an", the H is nearly or completely elided (drops out), making the pronunciation closer to "an istoric blahblah".

Anyway, the sound we commonly know as W (including, despite the lack of a W letter, the sound at the beginning of the word "one") is a voiced labial-velar approximant. (Occasionally it's devoiced, such as after T and K in stressed syllables, like in "twin".) Which is a big fancy linguistic name for a "weird thing", but point being it's not a vowel, so you use "an" in front of it.
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Lamiae is just a Romanized version of the original Greek plural of lamiai. the -ae is the plural nominative in Latin while the -ai is the plural nominative in Greek.
Techinically speaking, Lamia as a plural in English is incorrect, but since English is no longer as inflected as it used to be, we keep the phonetic ending but do not spell it as it should be done.
 
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