Patents and trade marks

The thirty-seventh entry is o acordo de não divulgação, and in English the full name of the thing is almost never spoken aloud. On paper it is « a non-disclosure agreement »; in a meeting it is « an NDA », and the article has quietly changed. That change is not a slip. English chooses between « a » and « an » by the sound the next word begins with, never by the letter it is written with, and an initialism is read out letter by letter: N is said « en », which opens with a vowel, so it takes « an ». The same rule runs through the rest of this page. A standard-essential patent is « an SEP », because S is said « ess ». It cuts the other way just as often, and that is where a learner is caught: « a university » and « a European patent » both begin with the consonant sound « yoo », while « an hour » begins with a vowel because the h is silent. Portuguese is spared all of it, since um and uma answer to gender and hear nothing at all.