Apologies!!
Careful rereading shows me you can see that perfectly well!
Sorry
YW
On 7 Dec 2006, at 12:50, Fanny Meunier wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Your question puzzled me and I googled "a worshop" (7840000 hits) vs
> "an workshop" (21500 hits).
>
> It struck me that they were quite a lot of German refs such as
> Sie bitte an workshop@... (= sthg like: please see workshop@...)
> schicken Sie bitte eine Email an workshop (= sthg like: please send
> an e-mail to workshop@...)
> direkt per E-Mail an workshop@... (= directly via e-mail to
> workshop@...)
>
> Food for thought...
>
> All the best,
> Fanny
>
>
>
> Le 13:13 7/12/2006,Diana Maynard écrit:
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>
>> No problem, it was my fault for being too hasty also.
>> I agree entirely.
>> Another little story....
>>
>> A non-English colleague asked me the other day if the correct phrase
>> was "a workshop" or "an workshop". I was quite surprised at the
>> question, especially as the colleague said he had searched for both
>> on Google as he was not sure which to use, and found more occurrences
>> of the former, but still many occurrences of the latter. He also said
>> that to him the pronunciation of the latter sounded better (which I
>> found odd as I actually found it quite difficult to pronounce, but
>> perhaps that's a non-native speaker thing).
>> I checked on Google and he was right about the occurrences.
>>
>> Are there any times when it would be OK to use "an" before a word
>> beginning with "w"?
>> I'd be interested to know what the BNC or other corpora show up on
>> that.
>> Diana
>>
>>
>> Ramesh Krishnamurthy wrote:
>>> Hi Diana
>>> Sorry about the brevity of my previous email.
>>> I didn't mean to be rude, just in a hurry as usual...
>>>
>>> But I was raising a genuine concern of mine. An experience last
>>> year: challenged in
>>> my daughter's school playground by 2 mothers who had heard of my
>>> involvement with
>>> writing dictionaries, I was asked to resolve their dispute: "is
>>> unpunctual a word, can I
>>> say unpunctual".
>>>
>>> It was not listed in any of the printed 6 or 7 native-speaker (US
>>> and UK) and
>>> learner's dictionaries I looked at. There were 15 occurrences in
>>> Bank of English (5 in British
>>> Magazines, 4 in Independent, and a few one-offs), so below the
>>> normal threshold for inclusion
>>> in Cobuild at the time.
>>>
>>> But I found 4320 hits on Google (43,100 today!
>>> - so has its usage increased, or has Google's trawl just got
>>> bigger?), *mostly entries in
>>> online dictionaries (based on each other?)*... but also 9000+ for
>>> impunctual, 5000 for non-punctual,
>>> 500 for nonpunctual, 400 for contrapunctual, 11 for apunctual, and
>>> 7 for anti-punctual...
>>>
>>> When I looked closer at the hits, most of the hits for impunctual
>>> were from a 1913 USA dictionary,
>>> most of the hits for non(-)punctual were (technical use) from
>>> linguistics texts, and
>>> most hits for contrapunctual were from music texts.
>>>
>>> So I told the mothers that unpunctual was a valid word form
>>> (ie created according to valid derivational rules)
>>> but that it wasn't very widely used.
>>>
>>> PS I've just noticed a discussion on unpunctual at
>>> http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=105391
>>>
>>> Best
>>> Ramesh
>>>
>>>
>>
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