Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Really? "The" is used when the listener knows which one you're talking about, or if there's only one. "A" is used when it's not known or not important which specific one you're referring to. What's an example that deviates from that framework?

[edit] "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians). Properly they mean "I go to [the/a] church", and the reason they leave out the particle is that they mean "THE CHURCH" but they want to sound humble, so they can't say that; but they also can't say "I go to a church," because that would be denying that the church they go to is the One True Church. That's why they don't use a particle in that particular phrase. The proper particle is "a", and "church" shouldn't be capitalized.

[edit2] this is not an attempt to start a religious flame war. I'm just commenting on the grammar.

[edit3] Just to demonstrate the proper noun thing I'm referring to, Jews "go to Temple" (capitalized, proper noun), or go to a temple, but they don't "go to temple".

It isn't that simple, unfortunately for learners of English. One example would be "Shall we go to the pub?" (British usage at least): No specific pub is intended, so a learner would expect 'a pub'. The only sure-fire way to grasp the subtleties of articles (or lack thereof in phrases like "go to school") in English is via immersion, as any rule system is going to fall foul of idiomatic exceptions. To bring this back to Japanese, I feel the same about 'wa' vs 'ga', it's best just to develop a feel for the distiction.

“I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”. These are typically used without context, and are exceptions that confuse learners, particularly those who are learning about articles for the first time.

Regarding “I go to Church”, the verb to go here doesn’t actually mean movement, it’s a euphemism for “I worship”. Same with “temple”. If you say “I go to a/the church” you are actually stating movement towards a definite or indefinite place.

Again, these are challenging subtleties for language speakers where all nouns are conceptual. And most native speakers can’t explain these exceptions spontaneously

I go to school.

I think school is in the same class as “work.”

> “I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”.

In my hometown: There's only 1 of each and wouldn't be confusing.

Where I live now: Which one?

These don't refute GP's definition, your examples are just missing the shared context that determines whether it's correct or not.

I think definiteness doesn't need to be a shared context.

"I went to the the train station to pick up a map on my way here". "Great, thanks!"

It was a specific train station that I chose intentionally or visit regularly, but it's not relevant to the conversation which one.

If I were to use "a train station" then it implies I didn't care which train station it was.

> "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians).

You're definitely wrong here, because "I go to school" and "I go to work" are equally grammatical statements, and there is no way to construe those as involving proper nouns. You can also see this construction with words like bed or the various mealtimes.

The commonality I can derive from these various examples is something along the lines of "state of being," although I find that a poor descriptor. This kind of formation is limited to relatively few locations (you can't say "I go to mall" for example), but for everything I can think up, you can also use the word sans determiner in other circumstances ("College has gotten expensive as of late," for example).

If you try to translate from one language with a definite/indefinite article distinction to another (say English to German or Spanish), you'll notice that in many edge cases, one language uses a different article than the other (or one of them uses no article, while the other does).

The "I go to Church" example, is a case in point. In both German and Spanish, a definite article is required.

That shows that, while there is a systematic difference between "a" and "the", it breaks down in many edge cases.

As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.

Then you have “I go home”, which drops not only “the” but “to”. Religious in nature? No.

This was some truly bizarre reasoning based off one example and it has zero actual foundation in language. One of the strangest comments I’ve ever seen on HN.

I wonder if “hospital” behaves the same way in some countries due to religious roots

In American English, people are in the hospital, but in UK English people are in hospital. So it only behaves that way in some Englishes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com