A/An .exe?

Grammatically, which do you think would be right? Because 'a dot exe' would be the way a lot of people would say it, but the first letter is still a vowel. Any thoughts?

I myself use:
An .EXE (An EXE)
A .PFD (A PDF)

I would expect that when grammatically refering to a file extension that the punctuation (period) is ignored.

I would say "An executable" or "An exe"

I say "Exe" with out A or An!
Simpler :D

An is only used immediately before a word that begins with a vowel, or in special cases where a silent letter preceeds a vowel. However, I have a hard time bringing myself to say "An Url". ;)

Thats probably because U in URL is pronounced "you" (consonant first) and E in Exe is "ee"(vowel first).

An is only used immediately before a word that begins with a vowel, or in special cases where a silent letter preceeds a vowel. However, I have a hard time bringing myself to say "An Url". ;)
That only seems to apply when you are reading a word that starts with a vowel sound (as Blackstone mentions...)
A box
An eagle
A question
An hour (h is silent)
A U, not an U. (as in the letter U)

An url would be fine if you said url as a word (earl), but since I say URL (you-are-ill), I use a.
An A, an E, an F, an H, an I, an L, an M, an N, an O, an R, an S, and an X.
All the rest use a.

Iceplug is verifiably correct, the A/an distinction is based on the fact that certain sounds cannot be placed next to each other, such as tp, tb, tz (in russian, its pronounced more like a slurred z, but thats unimportant) A/an is soley for ease of speech, and not a grammatical issue, A url and a .exe is just as legal as an url or an exe, there is no fundamental grammatical rule for a/an, just a phonetic one...


<<-- future linguist... :)

~~Joe

Iceplug is verifiably correct, the A/an distinction is based on the fact that certain sounds cannot be placed next to each other, such as tp, tb, tz (in russian, its pronounced more like a slurred z, but thats unimportant) A/an is soley for ease of speech, and not a grammatical issue, A url and a .exe is just as legal as an url or an exe, there is no fundamental grammatical rule for a/an, just a phonetic one...


<<-- future linguist... :)

~~Joe
But I've know people who can say things like "a elevator" without trouble, probably because they drawl the "a" out to something like "uh".

like i said, thats perfectly legitimate, the phonetic a/an rule is more of a guidline, its generally easier to say An elevator than a elevator, for some people, the accent is such that saying 'uh' elevator, or w/e is easier. thats the beauty of phonetics, there are no real ''rules'' (with some limited exceptions) you pretty much define rules based on the sounds your using, the rules are intrinsic to the sound not the word


hence uh elevaton has no bearing on the (V)/(VC) rule (the more generalized way of saying a/an, V stands for vowel. / for vs, VC for vowel-consanant combination.)

~~

>...tz (in russian, its pronounced more like a slurred z...)

Very true...Can confirm

like i said, thats perfectly legitimate, the phonetic a/an rule is more of a guidline, its generally easier to say An elevator than a elevator, for some people, the accent is such that saying 'uh' elevator, or w/e is easier. thats the beauty of phonetics, there are no real ''rules'' (with some limited exceptions) you pretty much define rules based on the sounds your using, the rules are intrinsic to the sound not the word


hence uh elevaton has no bearing on the (V)/(VC) rule (the more generalized way of saying a/an, V stands for vowel. / for vs, VC for vowel-consanant combination.)

~~
I seem to remember Ed Norton asking the "Chef of the Future" (a.k.a Ralph Kramden) of his amazing device, "Can it core a apple?" Probably a result of reading cue cards literally. :p

But I've know people who can say things like "a elevator" without trouble, probably because they drawl the "a" out to something like "uh".
Since all vowel sounds usually begin with a small vocal burst of air (at least they do when I say them), I'd probably mistake something like "a elevator" to be like some kind of stuttering sound.
"What tool allows people to go upstairs without stairs?"
"Uh... elevator"

again, phonetics is not an exact science, it depends heavily on the accent spoken with, and the particular style of speech someone uses, that is, what phonemes (fancy word for single sound), diphthongs (fancy for 2 sounds), and whole words a person likes, for instance, people who speak more fronted consanants (those sounds made at the front of the mouth, that is, p, b, th, t, etc) and dentals (dh (dh = th in then), l, in some cases r) tend not to have the 'vocal burst of air' because the above listed sounds do not require said bursts to be made, whereas gutterals and velars (g,k,x,etc) do, I would bet that Iceplug has some southern or midwestern influence, somewhere. I base this on the fact that Southerners tend to insert the Gutteral/Velar Stop in more places than say- Northerners (refering to new england & new york), like me, who tend to prefer a Free Radicals (Theory of my own-ish, it was formulated by a friend of my fathers, I formalized it) - (that is, words that end in vowels, though they should end in consanants, such as 'cah' for 'car') and Nasalized vowels (Bawstuhn for Boston). Thats just a guess though. I can't be fully positive, because I've only read what he says, not heard it.

now, if i had a wav file of about 10 seconds, I bet I could figure it out,
just something like

The Quick brown fox jumped over the lazy white dog. or w/e

:)

~~Kermit D Linguist.

there are no real ''rules'' (with some limited exceptions)
What are they?(the exceptions)

depends which way you say it

if you say "dot exe" then it's "A dot exe" file

if you say "exe" then it's "an exe" file

depends on the set of sounds you have, most common is what i call the 'too close' rule, if you were to look at sounds like they were a grid, according to place and type of articulation, that is:


Location --> Labial, Lab-Dnt, Dental, Velar, Gutteral
Type
(VVVV) p, b d,t k,g
Stop
__________________________________________________
Fricative
(a fricative
is a impeded f th
airflow, as in
f or th.)

etc etc

any two sounds on that grid cannot haphazardly go together, for instance
try pronouncing dt, without adding any extra sounds, namely vowels, you may (if your lucky) get away with something close, but most likely you cant, thats ok, its an impossible thing, the 2 sounds are ''too close'' to eachother to say w/o a vowel like dAt or dIt or dOt

try saying ft tho, much easier, no? f and t are not 'too close'

other rules like that exsist too, like the Voiced/unvoiced, for instance, the letters f and v are related, in fact, they are the same sound, with one minor difference

place one hand on your neck (right on the adams apple, careful not to choke yourself.) and say the 'f' so, don't worry, linguists much more classy than you have done this before( like Tolkien) (though- I can't say I'd suggest doing it in public, that might be odd) you (shouldn't, some accents do give this some voiceing) feel nothing, right? now try saying v, you should feel your vocal chords vibrate, that is the ONLY difference between those two letters. only one, really. try saying fv with no interim vowel, on second thought, dont, i just did and managed to spit all over my monitor...

those are a few, you can google Phonetics and find all the info you want, I'm sure.

While I'm here, let me harp on conlanging.

Phonetics (and the rules above) are integral parts of the Art of Conlanging,
Conlanging stands for Constructed language making. redundant, i know, but still, Conlanging is probobly my favorite passtime (its tied w/ vb... :P) and I have- to date - 39 different languages under my belt, if you would like to know more about conlanging, drop me a PM, I'll send you some links.

~~Joe

>I have- to date - 39 different languages under my belt,

You mean you speak all of them (wel even if it's 1/5 of that it's still impressive)?

yes I speak all my conlangs, I only fluent in 2 or three Reallangs (spanish and Sign being the two I think of off the bat, and spanish is only mostly fluent, I read it well, speaking it is another story. And yes, Signlanguage is a language.) as well as English, but as for conlangs, yes, 39. I generally invent a language to test an Idea, one of my more recent ones used a method I call Affixive Isolation Conjugation, that is, a conjugation of a verb (and noun) were niether inflecive (as in spanish, Hablar > Yo Hablo, Ud, Habla, etc.) nor Isolation (in Chinese, wo chi fan, fan meaning to eat, wo and chi meaning i and was or have been, respectivly) nor affixive, as in Quecha (pro Keh Chah, least thats how I pronounce it.) (i dont actually have an example, so i'll make something up... :P

Mirukela
mire = root
ke = 1st person conjugation
la = present tense

you essentially add affixes to make the conjugation.

With my language, Kehtsahri (Keht sah ree, which is based on the pronounciation of portuguese, quecha, and my own little concoction of random sounds.) I combined the Affixive and Isolation Ideas into one thing, so you place several affixes together and make an extra word before the verb, as in

ahsote shiahsa (pro: ah so taw shee ah say) which means nothing, I just made that up on the spot... :P

~~joe


EDIT: Typo, Not Affive, Affixive

I know he's trying to communicate with us, but I just don't understand anything he's saying :p

LOL. Indeed. Imagine how much more confusing if He threw in body language and facial expressions.

Interesting that the distinction for A vs An is phonetic. That is how I usually determine the form when writing. (Sounding it out in my head.)

"A User"
"An Utterly bad idea"
"An Exciting Idea"

well i may be young but i know one thing, its where ur from that counts, im in the states as u can see in the south. we slur a lot of words together and a elevator is commonly used if anyone actually talks of an elevator. so as to the a/an preceeding the .exe well... how would your neighbour say it?

thats the beauty of phonetics, there are no real ''rules'' (with some limited exceptions) you pretty much define rules based on the sounds your using, the rules are intrinsic to the sound not the word
Which pretty neatly sums up why using the phonetic method of teaching English to children is a terrible idea. We tried it for about 10 years back in the late 70's/early 80's and ended up with a generation of children who were completely unable to spell correctly. :-\

Only because they had to then convert it to conventional spelling.

If you could ignore the entire body of written work to date :rolleyes:
and then enforce the phonetic rules for english it would work.

Perhaps when all written material is electronic we can write a standard to phonentic translator one time and be done with it. :D

If you could ignore the entire body of written work to date and then enforce the phonetic rules for english it would work.
Except that Scottish English would suddenly become a foreign language for a Texan, and vice versa. :p
Imagine the student discussions... "What are you taking as electives this year? I'm thinking of Economics and Reading Southern Drawl 1."

Scottish English is about as close to a foreign language when spoken as it's possible to be without actually being a different language.

... That is how I usually determine the form when writing. (Sounding it out in my head.)

"A User"
"An Utterly bad idea"
"An Exciting Idea"

Me too. Funny ... we pick on people who can't read without moving their lips, yet you almost have to do that when writing dialogue!

Me too. Funny ... we pick on people who can't read without moving their lips, yet you almost have to do that when writing dialogue!

Unless your a forum addict. Then your fingers wiggle sub-conciously. ;)

Helen, Banjo, LOL :chuckle:

On a more serious but theoretical note. Wouldn't an taught phonetic language be the death of accents?

(Instructor: This is what it looks like when you spell it. This is what it sounds like.)

yes I speak all my conlangs, I only fluent in 2 or three Reallangs (spanish and Sign being the two I think of off the bat, and spanish is only mostly fluent, I read it well, speaking it is another story. And yes, Signlanguage is a language.) as well as English, but as for conlangs, yes, 39. I generally invent a language to test an Idea, one of my more recent ones used a method I call Affixive Isolation Conjugation, that is, a conjugation of a verb (and noun) were niether inflecive (as in spanish, Hablar > Yo Hablo, Ud, Habla, etc.) nor Isolation (in Chinese, wo chi fan, fan meaning to eat, wo and chi meaning i and was or have been, respectivly) nor affixive, as in Quecha (pro Keh Chah, least thats how I pronounce it.) (i dont actually have an example, so i'll make something up... :P

Mirukela
mire = root
ke = 1st person conjugation
la = present tense

you essentially add affixes to make the conjugation.

With my language, Kehtsahri (Keht sah ree, which is based on the pronounciation of portuguese, quecha, and my own little concoction of random sounds.) I combined the Affixive and Isolation Ideas into one thing, so you place several affixes together and make an extra word before the verb, as in

ahsote shiahsa (pro: ah so taw shee ah say) which means nothing, I just made that up on the spot... :P

~~joe


EDIT: Typo, Not Affive, Affixive
Isolation (in Chinese, wo chi fan, fan meaning to eat, wo and chi meaning i and was or have been, respectivly)
Kermit:
That's not a good example for isolation. :D I am not a linguist but I know Chinese: "wo" means I or me. "chi" means eat or eats (present). and "fan" just means food. :)
Other than that I understood nothing in this post :P :D
LOL

ok, first things first,

As an aspiring linguist and phonetisist, I am for to the Phonical reading approach for three reasons,

1) Sight-say (The other major form of teaching) encourages students to learn words according to sight, so, in the event that they do not know what a word looks like, they cannot even read it. much less understand its meaning.
2) Phonics, though harder to learn, is more effective in being able to pronounce, and thereby derive a root meaning. for instance

assume you are a sightsay reader with a normal vocabulary.

you know the word "transcendental" but not the word "transverse" in your spoken vocabulary, but not written vocabulary.
a phonics student also has the same restrictions.

you also know the the various roots of both.
that is:
Transcend (root) -ental(suffix)
and
Trans (prefix) - verse (root)

first problem you will encounter, how is transverse even said outloud? maybe you know the word, you just dont recognize it on paper, a phonetic student will know what it sounds like, and thereby could bypass a great deal of the following process

first, a sightsayer muse break up the first root into its parts, which notably, is not easy, because he must have at one point memorized the roots in order to break it down, assume he did, it then breaks to

trans (prefix) -cend (root) - ental(suffix)
and
trans (prefix) - verse (root)

now the sight sayer can compare the "trans" and see that they are the same, he would then have to identify another word with a similar root to aqquire the definition of the root. so really what you have is a do-loop mentality of definition, it would look something like


do while definitionfound = false
if found root = false then
call comparewithnextword
...
...
...
'the same type of thing for prefix(es) and suffix(es)


a brute force method, essentially, a phonics student must only "say" the word, that is, sound it out, to aqquire the meaning,

3) with the pronounciation of foriegn languages, a phonics student will have an easier time because he is allready in the mindset of learning what a sound says whereas a Sightsay will have to memorize another massive list of words (english alone has 100's of thousands of words, Spanish has a similar number, and spanish is considered one of the "easier" languages to learn.)


now, that said, I like sightsay for the following reasons.

1) for deaf and hearing impaired, it is the only way I can think of to teach them to read, because they cannot hear words, it makes phonetics impractical.
2) for speed and comprehension, Sightsay is wonderful, because it gives the reader the ability to run, rather than walk, thru words, consider:

the following sentence is given to a reader of each type.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy red dog.

each reader has a read speed of 1 second per particle that they read. that is.

a sightsay can read one word per second
a phonetic reader can sound one sylable

the sightsay will read the sentence (assuming he knows all words used) in 10 seconds, a phonics reader will take 12 seconds,

might not seem like much, but say that they were required to read it ten times aloud, and also that the phonics reader would allways sound it out, and not memorize the words, and that the sightsay will allways read from memory, it will take the sightsayer 20 seconds less. after 100 times, 200 seconds, as you can see, the sightsayer can read and comprehend faster. that said, let me end with this


but first, i need to explain my comment about rules with phonics and phonetics.

i said there are no ''rules'' in phonetics, dont confuse that with phonics, phonics is specific to the language, there are clearset rules in phonics, phonetics is more general, it is sound used in any language, not just english or chinese or what naught.

the best way to teach any non-hearing-impaired or non-deaf student is a combination of both methods, phonics in early youth, because at that point the child can learn the ''rules'' of phonics more easily, then as they get older, have them "memorize" for sightsay a list of basic vocab, that way, if they encounter a word in there spoken vocabulary, they can also read it, and notably, spell it, English phonics are very complex, which is why phonetic spelling is hard in english, but languages like spanish or latin are spelt VERY closely to how they are spoken, phonics rules are much more simple in those languages. the combination of sightsay and phonics is certainly the best way, im sure it has been tested and proven so, i do not however have any resources that show so, so i cannot be certain. however, I myself am a Hybrid reader and my current readspeed w/ 100% comprehension of all words
is ~300 wpm, a straight phonics student would probobly be slightly lower, to the tune of ~250 wpm, and a sightsay may have up to ~400 wpm, but not nessicarily 100% comprehension. and deriving meaning of words from context would considerably slow the reader down, so it would fluctuate between 200 and 400 wpm, most likely.


as for the isolation conjugation of chinese. it is a very good example, for the sole reason you gave, Isolation conjugation means you have seperate (isolated) words for the word "i" and "you" and also for present of past tense. mind you, i may not have the best example of chinese to show it with, but I do not speak chinese at all, i derrived the meanings of each word from the meaning of the whole phrase, so that was pretty much one big guess. (i borrowed that example from a article on conlanging i read).


as for the inability to read my example, lol- sorry, I'm a language nerd, yall are just code-nerds, we speak different dialects of nerdese-- I'll work on a translation.. :P

also on the sightsay thing,

technicly, the children taught phonetics were spelling everything correctly, and those useing conventional spellings are wrong, because as conventional spellers, we often ignore rules, such as pronouncing the "e" in "hate" technicly, that should be read as "hay TEH" with an accent on the "e", however, the "e" there is silent in conventional spelling.

There have been revisions to the spelling system of English. One of which created seperate symbols for ah and a (short and long "a" respectively)
I myself have created a basic phonic-spell alphabet which i use in my transliterations of various conlangs. hate would look something like:

hA t

hat would be

hah teh

that represents both stress (capitals), accent (italics, I pronounce hat with a little puff of air at the end) as well as unstressed (lowercase) and Macro/Micronic (long and short) letters (an -h is added to a short letter, and a long letter is simply the letter. as in

phonic-spell = conventional

jo = joe
joe = joey
josehphuh = joseph

isuhpluhgeh = Iceplug (yours happened to have lots of short vowels in it... :P

Phonic-spell also removes the letter 'c' entirely, part of the problem with conventional spelling is that "c" and "k" have the same sound sometimes, and "c" and "s" have the same sound sometimes. so, all that is needed is to remove c and replace with s as needed and k as needed, such that:

kawn vehn shuhn ahl = conventional
and
ice = is (remember i = long i, as in kite)

this form of spelling is correct according to phonics rules, but not to asthetic rules, like conventional spelling, notably,

kawn vehn shuhn ahl
doesn't look nearly as good as
conventional

which tells me that women had a heavy influence on English as it was being developed.

no wonder it sucks... :P (I don't like english much, I prefer ASL)

ps. Jk ladies, My female conlang friends allways make the best character sets, and thats makes up for yall screwing up my native tongue...

*whistles*

~~Joe

Could you explain what you meant below?



1) Sight-say (The other major form of teaching) encourages students to learn words according to sight, so, in the event that they do not know what a word looks like, they cannot even read it. much less understand its meaning.


I'm almost certainly a sight-say reader by your definitions: I've actually gone to read books out loud after having read them to myself and realized that I had no idea how to pronounce a name that I must have read hundreds of times (fantasy novels can have those sorts of things fairly often). In any case, I still understood the concept that the words were trying to evoke, which is the real goal of any writing.

The part that you refer to later with phonetics making it easier to break words down into prefixes/roots/suffixes - why would having the sounds rather than the characters make it easier? Either way, you have to see/hear enough words to get a good pattern match.

Of course, I think that most writing I've read tends to use a lot of unnecessary words anyway, but I'm a self-taught speed reader, so my opinion is tainted by that. I've never clocked my wpm, but I know it's higher than most of the people I know.

As for phonic-spelling, I wouldn't mind it for some words (I could see "hayt" being a better spelling than "hate" and I once thought I had a great poem, until I tried rhyming "bowl" with "hyperbole"...). Still, most examples that I have seen involve a great deal more effort to read and write. Yours uses extra characters for different vowel sounds, and accents being italicized or stresses being capitalized make it much harder to write something (even after training, typing these things will take longer because of more keystrokes, and you can't use capitalization/italicization for anything else). One of the nice things about English is that words can be written quickly because of the lack of accents. Yeah, people who don't know the words will have a more difficult time pronouncing them. I've always held written communication apart from spoken communication for that reason.

I think that the point is that neither technique is adequate on it's own. You need to both to get the most out of language and make proper use of it.

note that Phonic-spell was just a method i developed to suit my needs, it was not intended for as a true phonetic alphabet

as for the phonics/sightsay, the point is that the best is part of both worlds. no one system works perfectly in all cases, sightsay can be god in some cases, phonics in others, Hybrid read combines two good ideas to come up with a decent method. notably, the method i support.

~~Joe

Not to be the pedantic linguist, but in this discussion phonetics and phonology are being confused. A phonetical spelling would indeed mean that signs are pronounced in one exact way. Clearly, that's only relevant for language scientists and has no use for a real-world language.

The problem with English spelling, however, is that it's not phonological at all, meaning that the same phoneme can be spelled in many different ways (e.g. ea in dear and ee in sheer) and the same sign combination can stand for different phonemes (e.g. ea in bead and in wear).

The examples above probably make it clearer than an explanation, but for who's interested: A phoneme is the abstract representation of the smallest sound unit that can produce a difference in meaning. So [s] and [b] are phonemes because seat and beat are different words. How exactly you pronounce s is not relevant, it won't change the meaning of seat. So you could have a language with a perfectly phonological spelling (Turkish comes close I'm told) that still leaves just as much room for accents as English.

Golly! Then for truely Universal communication I better stick to the language of numbers and the language of love. (Gruff trots out his heart shaped abacus.)