Hi Minh, On Aug 29, 12:30 pm, Minh Nguyen <[email protected]> wrote: [...] > and you can safely put "a" before a number whose spelling begins with > a consonant. However, depends on where you are, people do say "an > hundred-cochain" with a silent "h", even though at least in Australia > it's "a hundred-cochain" where the letter "h" is not silent in > pronunciation.
Gosh, that's difficult! Concerning "h": I was told that here in Ireland, the children in school learn to spell "h" like "heitsh", not like "eitsh". And wouldn't it officially be "one hundred", not just "hundred"? So, is it then "an 100-cochain"? But this sounds odd to me, because my feeling is that "a one hundred" is easier to pronounce than "an one hundred". But even if the rule were as simple as "use 'an' if and only if the number starts with a vowel": Is there a function (or an easy algorithm) that answers whether a number starts with a vowel? John Palmieri suggested 8, 11, 18, 80-89, and I guess 1 also starts with a vowel (but really "an one-cochain"??). Anyway, thank you for your answers, although I am still kind of clueless... Cheers, Simon --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
