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