> (In literary Eng. the a is omitted, and the verbal sb. treated as a participle agreeing with the subject, and governing its case, to be fishing, fighting, making anything. But most of the southern dialects, and the vulgar speech both in England and America, retain the earlier usage.)
The "a-" prefix is a poetic construction that's a holdover from Middle English "y-", which is derived from Old English "ge-", a prefix attached to present and past participles. The usage is still current in German, but in English it's now used almost exclusively in poetry—normally music lyr...
That is not right.
Poor lad.
What he is talking about does not apply here.
The a + -ing word is not the worn-down ge- or y- thingie.
My understanding was that the cluster "str", for example in "stress", is usually pronounced /stɹɛs/, just like Wiktionary mentions. Their audio sample confirms this.
However, I sometimes hear a different kind of pronunciation, namely "shtress" or something like /ʃtɹɛs/ (forgive my IPA knowledge)...
Observed some words get pronounced with a /sh/ rather than /s/ in certain situations.
Stripes as "Shtripes" (from some "The Wire" episode)
Screw it as "shcrew it" (from a rap song)
In both situations, it seems to be a matter of emphasis, but is there some generic etymological root to this, e....
I am not familiar with that phenomenon, as I am not a consumer of such “songs”.
I have to cope with $job now, and worse things.
Young Master Purdy’s answer merits a contrarian comment at least.
Oh, sense 12 also applies. Here are some of its cites:
1662 H. More Ant. ag. Atheism (1712) iii. xiii. 130 ― The shrieks of men while they are a murthering. 1692 Bentley B.L. 211 ― The state or condition of matter before the world was a-making, which is compendiously exprest by the word chaos. 1727 Wodrow Corresp. (1843) III. 296 ― Tomorrow, all day, papers will be a-reading.
> 12. Process; with a verbal sb. taken passively: in process of, in course of, undergoing. Varying with in: ‘forty and six years was this temple in building.’ arch. or dial. (In modern language the a is omitted and the verbal sb. treated as a participle, passive in sense; as the house was a building, the house was building. In still more modern speech a formal participle passive appears: the house was being built.)
@AndrewLeach As a general rule, in Irish, s is pronounced sh at the beginning of a syllable, and ss (unlike the English z) at the end. So the Irish word is is pronounced to rhyme with the English hiss. The pronunciation of Sean also accords with this.
@Cerberus Yes. It's one of those misunderstandings/jokes/misheard whatsits that I picked up somewhere in one of those little humour columns in some magazine.
> The separate a is now rarely used, being replaced by the full on, in, or the various prepositions which represent them in modern idiom; except in a few verbal constructions, as to go a begging, to set a going; and in temporal distributive phrases, as twice a day, once a year, where it has been confused with the ‘indefinite article.’
> But the preposition a really remains in a large number of combinations, where present spelling treats it as a prefix to the governed word, and the whole as a compound adverb, as abed, afoot, aback, around, atop, afloat, asleep, alive. As these combinations are now viewed as individual words, they will be found in their alphabetical places. The separate uses of a, treated here, are very numerous, but all included in those of OE. on.
@Cerberus That's easy for you to say. But industrial design is hard. And each additional part, which costs pennies to make, translates into relatively large retail price differences. And fitting one more tiny feature into a cramped design is hard. And there are lots of usability questions about SD cards. By not having an SD card, or even an SD partition, the GN is easier to use because there's less to confuse people.
> b. Especially, with adverbs of repetition: once, twice, many times, oft a day (OE. on dæȝe), twice a week, thrice a year. In this construction a is now generally explained as the ‘indefinite article’; and it has, through such phrases as a penny a day, fourteen shillings a weeks, led to the use of a to express rate, or proportion, as in a penny a mile, tenpence a pound. Comp. French deux francs par jour, and deux francs la livre.
@Cerberus But that extra memory costs more. And they are trying to keep the hardware costs down so that they can, eg, put a more expensive screen in, or something.
@Cerberus In engineering school we learned how relatively small changes to the input price of designing a product lead to relatively large changes in the MSRP. Don't discount it so easily.
Hullo. How do you say "unlike the previous ones" when they were two cases before this one? This is the third case and I want to say unlike the others but also implying that the others were only two.
Is anyone else annoyed by the usage of 'wanting' in such instances as below;
"she was wanting to call her friend"
I've noticed this disproportionately among Americans in the south.
They seem to replace the phrase 'wanted to' or 'wants' (in this case they'd use 'was-wanting' as opposed to 'wan...
I ate today in a strange place today. It's called the Liberty Café. All the signs pointing to it (it's hidden upstairs in an office block, so it needs signs) have an image of the Statue of Liberty. The inside is full of US flags, and the whole is decorated with still photos from films.
@Bane I don't object to having Holly Golightly and the Rat Pack oversee me while I'm eating, but the flags were a little much. I did, however, finish Catcher in the Rye over lunch. Perhaps the US theme was appropriate.
I'm mostly stuck with reading medieval literature these days, and I'd rather not to... I hate the concept of having to read 24 books in a school year, it makes no sense. And half of those books I will probably not even understand!
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@Bane Apparently it's related to SE itself. That's the branding it has on it. But I've seen other chat rooms which claim to be related to SE, but have SO branding. I don't know why there are sites with SO branding on chat.SE, since SO has its own separate chat.
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One of the prevalent questions on the English Language and Usage – Stack Exchange is about whether a or an is the correct indefinite article to use. It’s a straightforward question, but like all questions, there are subtleties that raise further questions.
General Rule
The question of “a” vs “an” is always decided by the pronunciation of the word that follows the article, without exception. Words that begin with a vowel sound, such as apple, egg, or owl, use the indefinite article an. …
I'm still trying to figure out why the project lead sabotaged me. I'm thinking it might relate to the positive feedback he's gotten from the prior users about the new interface.
@Carlo_R. I’ve been learning English language for more than a half century, precisely 66 years since junior high. I don’t think the composition of the sentence “There is properly no history, only biography.” requires special and high level of knowledge about grammar and the meanings of “history” and “biology” simply available from dictionaries. I don’t think any of Oxford, Cambridge, and American Heritage Dictionary would give a workable answer to my question, which has nothing to do with a trove of dry definitions of word, “history” and “biology,” nor grammatical composition of it. — Yoichi Oishi8 hours ago
@Mitch To the contrary: what I want to know is what the expression means. As with any expression, it may may take some digging into the cultural context to answer it, but it's not a question about culture except in the sense that meanings are cultural.
The "a-" prefix is a poetic construction that's a holdover from Middle English "y-", which is derived from Old English "ge-", a prefix attached to present and past participles. The usage is still current in German, but in English it's now used almost exclusively in poetry—normally music lyr...
Observed some words get pronounced with a /sh/ rather than /s/ in certain situations.
Stripes as "Shtripes" (from some "The Wire" episode)
Screw it as "shcrew it" (from a rap song)
In both situations, it seems to be a matter of emphasis, but is there some generic etymological root to this, e....
Is anyone else annoyed by the usage of 'wanting' in such instances as below;
"she was wanting to call her friend"
I've noticed this disproportionately among Americans in the south.
They seem to replace the phrase 'wanted to' or 'wants' (in this case they'd use 'was-wanting' as opposed to 'wan...
Chat FAQ says:
What can we chat about?
This site is an extension of The Stack Exchange Network, so discussion should more or less revolve around the same topics you'd find at The Stack Exchange Network — but in an interactive, less strictly Q&A focused way. Do have fun, but please ke...
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…