At 08:19 AM 11/15/05 -0000, Jean Nathan wrote: >. . . some accents would sound like "a naluminium foil >helmet" or "a nempirical study" with short 'a' and very slight pause between >the 'a' and 'n'.
And all through history, "n" at the beginning of a word has tended to come and go. A word that begins with a vowel will latch onto the "n" from "an" and keep it as its own, and people will accuse words that came by their "n"s honestly of stealing them, and snatch them away. In checking my unabridged for the most-famous example, I learned that "apron" and "napkin" are both derived from "map", which used to mean "table cloth". A tableclothlet, how dull! I thought a napkin was tied at the nape! -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
