On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 05:11:39PM +1100, Paul Hampson wrote: > On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 05:32:10AM +0100, Florian Zumbiehl wrote: > > HPGL > > HTML > > HTTPS > > These three vary because the letter H is pronounced starting with either > a 'h' (haich) or an 'a' (aich). This is _probably_ a distinction between > American and British English, although it was originally a distinction > between social class of the speaker of British English. (cf. Pygmalion, > I believe) But I don't know which one's which. > > For me, "An aich-pee printer" sounds just as good as "a haich-pee > printer". I would say that in my experience (in American English, and I'm from the Midwest), one would typically use "an" in front of a pronounced "H", but "a" in front of words beginning with "H". So, "an HTML page", "a helper page". I don't think that this sort of thing is worth standardizing, given that there might be differences between typical British and American usage. We don't seem to standardize one way or the other on British vs. American spellings, like with "color" and "colour". In fact, believe it or not, the short description for the gimp-dimage-color package uses "colour" rather than "color"... > I just wanted to mention it, and also because this way I can have "pee" > associated with the Debian mailing lists in google. ^_^ Heh. That'll be funny until we get mail from the first person asking us to remove pee from their computer. (Damn! That probably made it worse.) KEN -- Kenneth J. Pronovici <pronovic@debian.org>
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