Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.

[Q]: There are many English words with silent letters, words like gnome or island that are spelt with consonants that aren't pronounced, but are there any words that work the other way round, with a pronunciation that includes extra sounds or syllables that are not in the spelling? I can't think of any real examples, hence this question, but a made-up example would be if gnome were spelt nome but pronounced with a g at the start. Or if people started pronouncing offer as 'ofter' as a sort of weird parallel to after. Note: I don't mean words like rough, where the f sound is spelt gh, because in those cases the spelling does still include letters (however seemingly illogical) for each of the sounds.
[A]: Probably 'yes', but it depends on what you mean. There isn't actually a clear way to identify which sounds in a word correspond to which letters: for example, rough, which you say has letters for 'each of the sounds', could be analyzed as r- + -ou- + -gh or as r- + -o- + ugh. When similar issues arise with other words, it makes it pretty subjective to decide whether the word has consonant sounds that 'aren't part of the spelling' or that just have an complex relationship to the spelling. Some words that could be considered to meet your criteria: Consonants Any word with an epenthetic voiceless plosive between a nasal and a following consonant. For many speakers, a productive process causes a sound like /t/, /p/ or /k/ to be inserted after the sounds /n/, /m/ or // respectively in various environments. In most words, the epenthetic plosive is not written, so you could say that there is a /p/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of warmth, dreamt, hamster, seamstress, a /t/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of sense, glance, a /k/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of strength, angst. In eighth and in one pronunciation of threshold, a digraph that usually represents a single sound corresponds instead to two sounds: /t/ and /h/ respectively. You could say that the /t/ in eighth or the /h/ in that pronunciation of threshold isn't part of the spelling. Something similar applies for speakers who use the pronunciation /hat/ instead of /hat/: whether it's spelled height or heighth, it seems like one of the two sounds at the end is not explicitly represented in the spelling. In some accents of British English, the vowels found in words like saw and draw is regularly followed by epenthetic /r/ before another vowel. This means that the words sawing and drawing are pronounced with an /r/ that 'isn't part of the spelling'. Vowels or syllables Many words with syllabic resonants, or sequences of a schwa followed by a resonant, have no particular letter that marks the syllabicity. Words ending in -thm or -sm are the most obvious example. Other examples are more dialect dependent, but words like hour are disyllabic for some speakers.


[Q]: In other words, which sentence is correct? At least one of them is not coming. At least one of them are not coming.
[A]: In English, grammatical number often follows the form of the sentence rather than its meaning, especially in cases where the meaning allows for a variable number in the subject. In those cases, the verb usually agrees with the syntactic number of the closest subject noun instead of the meaning of the whole noun phrase. For example: Some of them are not coming. One or more of them are not coming. These sentences means the same thing as your example. They both use a plural verb because the nearest subject nouns, some and more, are plural. However, in your example, the nearest noun is singular: At least one of them is not coming. Therefore, the verb follows the same (singular) form as the noun, even though the noun phrase in the subject allows for the possibility of more than one. Note that this rule affects both the number and person of the verb: Either those jerks or I am not coming. In this case, the verb is the first-person singular am because the nearest subject noun is the first-person singular I. However, many people would find this construction awkward and rewrite the sentence in a more natural way, perhaps: Either those jerks aren't coming, or I'm not.


[Q]: Possible Duplicate: Do you use 'a' or 'an' before acronyms? Does one use 'a' or 'an' before the word 'X-Ray'? Quite simply, should a sentence read 'a XML report' or 'an XML report'?.
[A]:
It's 'an XML report', because which form of the indefinite article to use is decided by how the next word is pronounced. In this case, it's pronounced: An ex-emm-ell report 'XML' begins with a vowel sound, 'e', so an is used rather than a.


