> Brent: Ah, the tax man.
> Drey: A tax man.
> Brent: Pardon?
> Drey: I'm not the tax man, I'm a tax man. Saying the tax man is just a little dehumanizing, thank you very much.
[…]
> Brent: A tax man. And whatever you, don't call him "the tax man." Call him "a tax man" or he kinda goes squirrelly on ya.
> Wanda: Some people are sensitive about article use.
> Brent: About what?
> Wanda: Proper article use. "A" or "an" are indefinite articles. "The" is a definite article. In fact, some people say "the" is "the" definite article.
[…]
> Hank: I know what I'm doing. We get the tax man...
> Brent: A tax man.
> Wanda: Actually, in this case you can say "the" tax man, because you're referring to a particular person.
they/them/an
Nah. English articles make sense, they're just usually unnecessary, and languages can often do without the information they add (or they reduce ambiguity in other ways.) English articles certainly reduce the context necessary to understand an isolated sentence.
In Spanish, for example, knowing the subject of the conversation or even knowing what's going on in the surroundings of the speaker might be necessary to understand a subjunctive. In English, hearing a definite article will tell you that you've missed something if you don't know what it refers to; hearing an indefinite one will assure you that you haven't. Hearing an article at all will assure you that the noun isn't being verbed (if it's not obvious.) It's impossible to tell what some Spanish sentences mean in isolation, because you don't know who would do, could do, should do, or was doing the thing. Means nothing in normal conversation. Koreans are like "how do you even know how old they were?" Quechua are like "how do you even know how they found out?"
There's a good reason for everything in language, because if we don't need it, it will just get dropped. The obvious purpose of a thing might not be the reason that it is necessary, though. It may plug an ambiguity hole left by other parts of the language. It may be necessary socially/religiously. It may just reduce to a tolerable level the amount of thinking one has to do before beginning to speak.
> It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know.
Definitely true, but this is a bad example. English adjective order is the really good example that people usually cite. We don't even know that we're doing it. Also all of our weird grammatical tones, and our strong word/phrase -initial stress. Shifting that stuff changes meanings completely, everybody understands, nobody notices. Except people coming from tonal languages, trying their best not to sound like robots or broken tape recorders.
The "I don't know" noise, "[note]mmm[higher note]MMM[middle note]mmm," and the other weird sing songy grunts we do that are words. Our crazy vowels. The fact that the word "tests" is a voiced click and two hisses.
And that's not even getting into politeness - and the difference between modulating politeness and indexing politeness. English speakers modulate. Speakers of many Asian languages index. We change forms of address as a way to express how we currently feel about someone, whereas when a Korean person starts dropping honorifics, it almost means they don't even think you're human.
I believe this is quite uncommon in European languages (a system where the same word is pronounced with different sounds based on the topic level stress assigned to it, not on basic prosody/word sequence/etc). Apparently Dutch has a similar system.
"Pass me a plate" - any plate will do. "Pass me the plate" - I want the specific plate which we were talking about.
“This was a nice evening” is also difficult to characterize as not caring about which evening it is. As are books titled “An Introduction to XYZ”, where both the authors and the readers will probably care about the specific book.
I'm going to a bank, a shop, a dentist - I've found a new one and I may well be about to describe it to you.
"A nice evening" - there have been ones before, there hopefully will be again, this was one of them.
Here it only sounds OK if you make the adjective stronger ("this was the nicest evening", though you'd probably avoid "nice" in this case and go with "best", "most amazing"...), or drop the adjective altogether ("this was the evening").
So nuance is that you might have many nice evenings, with this being one of — but what if you do not, and all are actually terrible except for this one? I guess with proper pronounciation of "THE nice", it can still work (we already talked about nice evenings and not-nice ones, so it'd be "this was the nice one"), but it'd be pretty awkward.
However it can makes sense if the surrounding context supports the idea of only one nice evening.
Grammar rules are generally about the surrounding context which allow us to leave out superfluous or repeated information and still be understood. Things sound strange when that missing information can’t be deduced from context.
Edit: Here's a frustrating HN thread where someone tried to claim it makes sense, but it turned out his argument hinged on "well obviously all native English speakers regularly go to some store, right?" Screw the homebound.
I think the usage falls into this group: "The first group consists of nouns which refer to shared knowledge of the situation or context...",
When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. Friends and neighbours would have also have known up to fairly recently, when people still mostly walked for groceries and such to the few small stores nearby and made friends with people who lived close.
So, I'd say it's a bit of a colloquial hold over from walking times and construction taking a listener into confidence.
But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to.
I’m not necessarily saying they should stop doing this, but it’s clearly not the usual kind of definiteness implied but the use of “the”.
A prescriptivist pedant might insist that this is incorrect, and they should instead say "I need to go to a store", but in my judgment as a native speaker, the version with "the" is more idiomatic, and the version with "a" sounds stilted.
To repeat another part of my initial post, it's like the use of "the" in "the bigger they are, the harder they fall". It's clearly a different usage/meaning/sense of "the" -- in fact, most other languages use a different word for that sense. (German uses je ... desto.) It would be very dubious to explain all uses of "the" as "oh its when the noun has definiteness". It wouldn't cover that case, and it wouldn't cover (the typical use of) "I went to the store".
Some of the statements (by other people) in this conversation are wrong, based on applying a school-style oversimplified explanation that doesn't really match English usage.
How can this be in your example? When I am saying "I went to the store", I am really saying "There are a group of locations that I could have gone. E.G., the car dealership, the bank, the museum, the store, or the office. I went to the store".
Well, that would work for many uses of the, but it's definitely not a correct explanation here. If I have no idea where the bank is, I'll still describe myself as going to "the bank". I could tell you that "I'm going to the bank", go out and get in my car, and then look up where a convenient bank is. This has to be viewed as idiomatic, or as "the bank" being an abstract task-based location rather than a concrete physical location.
"I have the son" sounds odd, even if there is only 1 son on your mind.
"Our house has a pool" for example. There is a very specific pool being referred to, but it's sufficiently indirect that "the" would never be used here without radically changing sentence meaning.
It's like saying "our house has a roof" — very similar, but nobody really cares about the roof, the focus remains on the house.
If you refer to that same pool without introducing it, it will still be marked for definiteness - compare my pool, my house's pool, or the pool at my house. But your example sentence doesn't work that way.
(Note that the three phrases I listed are all bare noun phrases that can't stand as sentences. Note also that if you used one of those phrases when your listener wasn't already aware that you had a pool, they might feel that you "moved too fast" in the conversation, assuming that they knew about your pool when they didn't.)
And he may be saying "a" about the word "nice" instead of about the word "evening".
Note: This is just my opinion and an attempt at trying to make sense of it. Purely subjective take as I usually refrain from making purely opinion based arguments.
All of the above is in my opinion, but I never state that and assume a good faith reader will take it as such (here for demonstration purposes only :)).
So in short, thanks for your opinion, and I agree this is the largely the basis for choosing between an indefinite and definite article, also opening them up to inquiry ("I am going to the store" — "oh, which one?"; compare to "I am going to a store" — "what are you getting?").
For context, extensive coding over two decades has ingrained in me the habit of explicitly disambiguating my statements of machine-executable logic expressed in natural language from personal guesswork and opinions.
I should integrate your suggestion and try not to explicitly qualify my guesswork. Using passively implied qualifiers in the structure of my opinion pieces would be a step in the right direction.
"Chocolate ice-cream is the best" is very clearly not an (attempt at) objective statement and needs no qualifiers. Only if the reader really wants to be malicious, they can question even that too: what do you base that on? how many ice-cream types have you tried? is there a study confirming preferred taste among a large population? is it cultural and has that been tested? ...
"In my opinion, based on roughly 60 ice-cream flavors I have tried in my life, and having tried chocolate flavor in at least 50 different places, I find that the taste of chocolate ice-cream on average is the best tasting ice-cream regardless of my mood, fullness or place of production and variety of 'chocolate' used" makes for a very boring conversation — except sometimes when you are making a go at it :)
So I feel the rule isn't always taken literally, but the vs a is selected based on whether something is up for consideration/substitution rather than something that's well defined and specified.
Because you are referring to a specific one of each, even if a listener doesn’t necessarily know which specific one, they know that you know.
In the case of your example the listener assumes you mean whichever specific dentist you are currently seeing. That fact that you may choose one randomly each time is an exception.
the doctor, the cinema, the dentist, etc imply there's one family connection you use, or it's the local place everybody uses. "The" specifies "the one" everybody uses.
I'm guessing saying 'a' doctor would've looked at the role as an abstract concept. "To be a doctor would be wonderful" vs "to be the doctor would be wonderful".
I guess it's language clinging on to a sense of community.
For instance, "the bald eagle is native to North America".
There is also "The" in names; The Beatles, The Great Lakes, The Bahamas, The Bronx, ...
The role of "the" depends on context: how was the subject treated in previous sentences in the conversation.
"I see a bald eagle out of the window. The bald eagle is huge!"
In this second sentence, there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles, because the previous sentence introduces the topic of the sighting of a bald eagle. It refers to that one.
If "the bald eagle is huge" appears out of the blue, not preceded by any discussion of any eagle, that tends to bring in the class interpretation.
I learned the above through Japeanese. A similar thing happens with the は (wa) topic particle; I realized that "the" works in a similar way in that regard.
Well, on second thought ...
"I play the piano"
And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!
In the sentence "There is a piano in the lobby" you are saying "There are many objects in the lobby. Among them is a piano, one of many in the world".
When "you can play the piano", you can play any piano. When "there is a piano in the lobby", it's distinctively a very specific one.
So I would go on a limb and claim: whether you use the or a is also philosophical in nature :)
> What do you play (in the orchestra)?
> I play the piano (in the orchestra).
Using 'the' here feels quite formal, as if you belong to something, or it's a career choice.
> Play any instruments?
> ah, I play guitar (casually)
> Yes, I play the guitar (for a band, or at least I larp as doing so)
When it comes to 'a/an', we should assume that there's an element of randomness, or irrelevance as to which one precisely.
> What you doing tonight? Playing guitar
> What you doing tonight? Playing a guitar
> What you doing tonight? Playing the guitar.
The second option doesn't sound natural interestingly, as 'tonight' in the question implies there's a plan. Playing 'an' instrument, therefore, comes off as more spontaneous; playing 'any' instrument which just happens to be there.
However as I thought more about it I realized it gets a little more complicated. I’m not academically studied in English, though I am a native speaker.
For example if you say, “Our town has a castle” - that’s a specific castle but you wouldn’t say “our town has the castle.”
Why? It has to do with what the listener knows. “Definite” means the subject is known to the listener. If I’m introducing a castle into the conversation that you don’t know, I’m talking about _a_ castle. Now that it’s introduced, I can tell you about _the_ castle.
You use either “a” or “the” when you are specifying a class of things. “Our town has a castle” could be any castle. “Our town has the castle” would be a bit more rare and sounds weird as a general statement, but is valid in certain circumstances. “The castle” here means that the castle is something, or connected to something we have already been discussing and I’m referring to it, so the “our town” must be the new information. Like maybe we are discussing what we should do when you next visit, and I suggest seeing some particular famous tapestries. You say “wait, isn’t that castle [in which the tapestry is displayed] in Edinburgh?” And I reply “no, our town has the castle.”
You don’t use any article at all when what you’re talking about is unique. For example, “our town has Neuschwanstein Castle.”
Edit: or there is something which follows, e.g. “our town has the castle where they filmed Braveheart.”
You can also say "Our town has the castle", which... now there it gets weird. I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that. Well I guess it's specific in that it is one of the few (specific) things it has going for it.
Yeah. I think what happens is that the implied group of things in which the castle belongs changes. "The town has the castle" could be understood as “there is only one castle and the town has it” (the group is that of all castles). But it’s nonsense. Your understanding seems right to me, but I am not a native English speaker. It is something along the lines of “among the things the town has, the only notable one is the castle” (it’s the only castle in the set of things the town has).
What is tricky is that the group in which the castle is unique is implicit.
Native English speakers, please correct me if I'm wrong about the "the castle" example.
Compare: "Sacramento is the capital." You could say Sacramento is a capital if the reference group includes Albany, Austin, Tallahassee, etc. Or you could say Sacramento is the capital if the reference group includes Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, etc.
Speaking of the house or town, the important information is what class it belongs to, not the specific castle/pool/roof...
As you point out, "the" will have a very specific, highlighting meaning in that case.
I had always been good at grammar in high school, but this was a different world and I had no idea what I was in for. We spent the first two weeks discussing the differences between the and a, and the next two weeks on the differences between this and that, and the rest of the semester felt more abstract. It was quite illuminating for me.
Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag.
It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.
Learning about the order of adjectives (big old red ball - try swapping any of those around) when I was dabbling in Klingon and the affix contests ( https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix and https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes ).
And from this we can extrapolate what flip flops would be called if we had three feet!
Also see https://www.poetryverse.com/spike-milligan-poems/on-ning-nan...
But (in)definite articles aren't difficult, you're either talking about some member of a group or class of items without specifying which one (a), or you're talking about one particular example or instance that is being referenced in context (the).
I don't understand how languages can talk about things precisely without them. I guess they just use context, more or other words in their place, or structure sentences differently. English just feels convenient in this case, but obviously I am biased.
It takes time to learn things like "at school" vs "at the school", "to school", "to the school", "I know English", not "I know the English", but "I know the English language" etc. etc. It's obviously easy when you speak it natively, but it just happens to be a certain way and could plausible be in another way too, as other languages show.
[I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school
[I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced
"I know the English" - I know the English people
"I know the English language" - I know the English language (specifically)
The point being that articles do a lot of work. They're not just decoration whereby there is some arbitrary correct form or rule. It's a matter of what you want to say.
But in the third and forth sentences 'English' is both a collective noun and the name of a language which is just a coincidence.
> [I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced
That's not the distinction that the OP is making. If you say "I am at school", it means you are a student, you attend school. If you say "I am at THE school", it means you are physically at the school building, without specifying whether you are a student. Both of those options are different from saying "at a school." See also "prison", "work", "bed". Similar distinction (in UK English, not so much American English) with "in hospital" vs "in the hospital."
As was pointed out, "I go to the dentist every year" doesn't necessarily mean a particular dentist; it just means some dentist, but we use the definite article anyway, because I guess we consider all dentists interchangeable? We don't use definite articles even when we are referring to a specific thing in specific phrases, such as "I went to Florida by [the] car."
Then there's highly idiomatic use of articles with proper nouns. We say "Buckingham Palace" [no article] but "The Washington Monument" [definite article]. We talk about "The Rockies" [definite article] but "Mount Fuji" [no article]. "Germany" but "The United States." Sometimes we use the definite article when referring to to racial or ethnic groups, and sometimes we don't, and that choice can have complicated social implications ("The Blacks", anyone?).
In short, if a native English speaker tells you that article use is straightforward, then they simply have not considered all the cases.
* I understand all languages. -- unbounded set, applies to every language, everywhere
* I understand all the languages. -- bounded set, applies to a known set of languages, i.e. specifically those languages which are supported by a particular program
To be fair, I think "all cases" in this situation is also acceptable.
- The rules of a/the are simple.
- Not really, if you think so, then you haven't considered _all cases_. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...]
but:
- The rules of a/the are simple.
- Not really. There's this exception and there's that exception. [...] If you think the rules are simple, then you haven't considered _all the cases_.
[1] but take what I write with a big grain of salt, I can't explain why I wrote "the idea" or "the start" and I'm not 100% sure if that's correct :)
- I don't think the explanation of "all cases" vs "all the cases" fully works. I agree with other commenters that in this example, either phrase might be used. (Whether the sentences comes after a point-by-point discussion or before.)
To me, the version without the has a less natural feeling. You might describe it as more formal, or more stilted, or more abrupt, but the main point is that it's going to be somewhat dispreferred. There isn't necessarily a reason for the preference to tilt one way or the other.
Your description is incomplete. I agree that "I'm at school" carries at least a strong implication that you are a student at that school, but it also carries the denotation that the school is where you are currently physically located. If you want to specify that you are currently a student without claiming that you're currently on the premises, you would need to say "I'm in school", though that particular expression (a) doesn't specify which school you attend, and (b) can't be altered to provide that information (which is to say, you can't replace "school" with the name of a school). To get there, you need to change the verb; you can say "I attend Florida State", at which point the stative inflection on attend makes it clear that you aren't discussing your current physical location.
The hospital example is pretty much the same. Being "in the hospital" is analogous to being "in school", a fact about your current status rather than your current location. For your location you'd want to use "at", which doesn't have the same weird thing going on in "at the hospital" that it does in "at school".
No. To be "in hospital" or to go "to hospital" means that you are a patient. To be "in the hospital" describes only location.
> Your description is incomplete
Your analysis is fine, but does not contradict my comment and moreover is irrelevant to the present discussion, which pertains to the subtle use of articles in English.
>>> in UK English, not so much American English
---
> Your analysis is fine, but does not contradict my comment and moreover is irrelevant to the present discussion, which pertains to the subtle use of articles in English.
As you can see from the dialectal difference you've already described, what you're talking about isn't really related to "the subtle use of articles in English". American English and British English agree on how their articles are used. Where they agree on "in school" and disagree on "in hospital", you can recognize that usage in those phrases, rather than revealing some kind of subtle point about how the is used in nearly-identical contexts, is determined arbitrarily.
I wasn't aware that I was making a "subtle" point. I was joint showing that the use of articles in English is complex and hard-to-predict for non-native speakers, in contradiction to the claim (paraphrased) that "Just use the for things that are definite, duh!" Your observation that article use varies between dialects of the same language strengthens my point, insofar as encountering inconsistent use makes learning the language even harder.
> is determined arbitrarily.
I don't know what you're trying to say here. Languages vary systematically over time. Just because two different dialects, or two different languages, do things in different ways doesn't mean that those changes were arrived at arbitrarily.
> [I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school
According to most comments here this should be "at a school" then :)
This one time I was at a company get-together and the CTO, whose son was just born, received some Peppa Pig merch.
I exclaimed (in English) "Peppa Pig is the shit!"
The HR lady stared at me as if I killed her father with an accordion.
I can't resist linking this bit of linguistic humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo
While I struggled to answer, he graphically gestured, and I agreed.
"But... also means... 'friend'?"
Oh. Big cultural difference. I had to explain how US males used insults as a proxy for affectionate gestures, to someone who uneasily spoke English.
He was not fully convinced, I think.
I'd still like to encourage you to put some energy into getting it right because this mistake is very confusing for native speakers of a language that makes the distinction.
I cannot tell you how often I was listening to someone telling me a story about the thing where I sat impatiently waiting for them telling me which particular thing or person they ment only to realize they were not talking about something particular at all.
But here I find it's mostly about trying to get into their linguistic framework when trying to understand them, and with my background of native Serbian being a very phonetic language, I can easily figure out when someone is coming from a more phonetic background: eg. or pronouncing "j" sound like "y" in "yay", more literal reading of other letters, etc. You obviously expect them to miss out on articles, tenses and even word ordering, so you work it all backwards. A bit like that trick for LLMs with broken, concise English.
So I really put it on me to re-process their language into what is the likely message they are trying to convey, and do not expect the precision of a native speaker.
It is hardest when someone's command of a language seems to be high (eg. they have great pronunciation and decent vocabulary), yet the basics are all wrong :)
And in some cases, it helps to know a bit of their native tongue, like with the Spanish and all of those "e-station" instead of "station", "e-static" instead of "static" (no, not "ecstatic" :), "e-sports" instead of "sports" etc.
"a vs the" is quite easy IMO.
Most non-native however do not use "that" and "which" properly though. "Give me the floppy disk that is blue" and "Give the floppy disk, which is blue" are two different things.
Short form, for those who wonder:
"That" is used for things that are important, and "which" is used for things that aren't. In the first sentence, they want the blue floppy disk in particular. In the second, they want the floppy disk, and it happens to be blue. The "which" is added to aid the listener, not to because the color blue is important.
If that's interesting, it's worth Googling for a more precise answer.
sorry, just joking, this is not meant to be a genuine counterargument^^
I just want one of the new triple-cheese sandwiches please. And the salad of the day as a side.
GP's should be used when offering a specific one, like "the red one".
If the audience already has some context about which specific car you were going to buy, then you could say "I bought the car yesterday." In that case you're referring to a specific car that the audience is expected to already be familiar with.
I think some of the confusion over this seems to be coming from attempting to apply knowledge that you have to a sentence when the audience wouldn't have that knowledge.
“I bought the car” would indicate that you bought a specific one that is jointly understood.
In fact, if you had previously talked about a specific car you were thinking about buying, “I bought a car” would be a strong indicator that you bought a different vehicle than what was discussed.
that said I know in business communication this kind of thing can be less forgiving. i will say that grammar and syntax checking for non native speakers is one of the few very beneficial applications of LLMs.
I know, in my heart of hearts, that I sound painfully ESL to proficient native speakers, but they are a minority of a minority, so.
Is it up for debate? What is the argument against including Hungarian in Finno-Ugric? I mean, the "Ugric" part of Finno-Ugric is in reference to Hungarian.
As far as I know (and as confirmed by Wikipedia [1]), Sorbian does not have articles. Maybe you are thinking of Bulgarian, which does have articles (although the definite article attaches as a suffix to the noun, rather than being an independent word).
When Wikipedia says "Sorbian uses no articles", it is not telling the full story.
I couldn't find much on this online when I searched for it. But did find at least one respectable reference, which agrees with what I remember:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277973156_Unarticul...
Abstract: "Slavonic languages in general do not use articles to indicate (in)definiteness. The development of an article in some of them is the result of language contact. In the case of Sorbian the influence of German led to the use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the numeral ‘one’ to indicate definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively. Originally the German system was copied almost without changes, but eventually specific rules developed, subject to phonotactic constraints and restricting the use of the article mainly to intratextual and pragmatic definiteness. The use of the article depended on the kind of text and language (spoken language, Bible translation and original texts, translations from German). Grammatical purism managed to eliminate the use of the article in today’s written variants as well as in most official uses of spoken Sorbian almost completely. In colloquial language and in the dialects, however, the article is very much alive but its use differs considerably from German. There are also differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, the latter being closer to German usage."
Wikipedia tends to be better on linguistics than some other areas, but best not to become over-reliant on it. This is just one reminder that it does not cover many things.
Native English speakers living for a decade or more in the Czech Republic (and picking up Czech in the process) may experience "retroactive article confusion", they may start to drop articles while speaking their mother tongue English.
... den, des, dem. But those are derived from the three bass cases.