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Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com wrote (in part):>
> Somebody wanted a summary of FQDN and the rules for the fields, and the
> discussion went back and forth in e-mail with one person talking about
> "an FQDN" and the other about "a FQDN", indicating that the first person
> pronounces the letters of the initialism, and the second person either
> always speaks out the full four-word name (even in his head?) or else
> calls it a Fekudden... which I simply won't allow in my docs.
I think the real issue here is that many people remember the rule for
the indefinite article as being "use 'an' only when the following word
begins with a vowel", when the _real_ rule is "use 'an' only when the
following word begins with a vowel _sound_". The whole point of
using "an" rather than "a" is to avoid the awkwardness of pronouncing
two consecutive vowel sounds.
Applying the version of the indefinitie article rule that is missing the
last word in this case yields "a FQDN" regardless of how one pronounces
or subvocalizes the initialism, and regardless of how hard it might be
to pronounce "a eff".
-Fred Ridder
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