The university allows URLs as a “person name”, so the spammer bots filled forms everywhere filling with my email and the spam URL as my name. So i’m getting bombarded by “legit” emails with a spam url as in “hi SPAM_URL”

  • citrusface
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    159 months ago

    Hold on, English is dumb as fuck, is “an university” correct?

    • @nawa@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I would guess this person pronounces it like “ooniversity” in which case it’s correct, it depends on if there’s a vowel or consonant sound, not what letter it is. But I never heard it pronounced that way, for me it’s always been “youniversity” and in that case it’s incorrect.

    • @squid_slime@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      No although it should be, an is used in place of proceeding a vowel

      The correct usage is “a university” because the pronunciation of “university” begins with a consonant sound.

      • @dnick@sh.itjust.works
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        109 months ago

        Because an precedes a word that starts with a vowel sound, not just because they start with a vowel letter

    • @SoleInvictus@lemmy.world
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      79 months ago

      OP is Italian. The u in the Italian word for university, universitá, is said with a vowel ‘ooh’ sound instead of a consonant ‘you’ sound. I’d wager they remember their English ‘a vs an’ rule phonetically and, with the words being so similar between languages, mixed the pronunciation up. I’m a native English speaker and that’s 100% how I fuck up my Italian.

      • @ani@endlesstalk.org
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        9 months ago

        In Latin langs, y sounds like i (e sound), so that’s probably where the confusion comes from.

    • @Fridgeratr@lemmy.world
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      49 months ago

      It’s debatable, technically it does start with a vowel so “an” should be used, but since it starts with a Y consonant sound, using “a” sounds a lot better and may also be considered correct/better.

      • @max@feddit.nl
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        29 months ago

        Yes, but no. Your rule is correct, but the application of it isn’t. “An” is used for vowel sounds.
        University (you-knee-ver-city), UFO (you-eff-ooh) use “a”, while honorable (on-oohr-a-bul) uses “an”.
        Confusing language for sure.