Documentation: grammar errors

[jrgalyan]

There are many places in the tutorial where "an specific", "an special" or "an static" is used. These should be "a specific", "a special" or "a static".

[rliesenfeld]

Ok, will fix.

BTW, it's quite difficult to find anywhere that mentions the grammatical rule for use of "a" or "an" before a word starting with a double consonant; all I find is the simple rule about words that start with a "vowel sound". Apparently, the root of the mistake was that, for portuguese speakers like me, words like "specific", "static", etc. all sound like they have an initial "e" (the corresponding words in portuguese and spanish do start with "e").

[jrgalyan]

That's what I figured. In English, words beginning with "s" are not pronounced as though they begin with "es", so the article "a" is correct. So, "static" is pronounced like "sstatik" and not "esstatik", and so forth.

The rule is to use "an" before singular-form nouns starting with a vowel ("an escargot," "an automobile," "an orchestra"), and "a" otherwise ("a story," "a novel," "a film").

I know this is challenging for native Portuguese or Spanish speakers because of how words are pronounced in your native language; no insult is intended here. I also know that English-as-a-foreign-language courses teach the rule based on pronunciation ("if the noun starts with a vowel sound..."), which is the source of the confusion.

All the best,
Jeff

On Aug 28, 2014, at 10:58 AM, Rogério Liesenfeld notifications@github.com wrote:

Ok, will fix.

BTW, it's quite difficult to find anywhere that mentions the grammatical rule for use of "a" or "an" before a word starting with a double consonant; all I find is the simple rule about words that start with a "vowel sound". Apparently, the root of the mistake was that, for portuguese speakers like me, words like "specific", "static", etc. all sound like they have an initial "e" (the corresponding words in portuguese and spanish do start with "e").

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[rliesenfeld]

Documentation updated.