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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

You should not look at superficial similarities between languages, but at logic.

To the question: "What is he?", the answer can be "He is married, tall, doctor in medicine".

On another point of view, "He is a doctor" = "one in the set of the doctors". (But which one of the crowd there? The tall one is the doctor.)

"He is doctor in medicine": identity; "He is a doctor": aside property.

With different expressions, you are not expressing the same thing, but different ideas (some of them more preponderant in use in a territory).

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I'm not sure why, but sentence feels forced and unnatural, and as a result a bit unconvincing. My intuition is to insert an "and" at the end of those three options and then it feels like you can't drop the "a", i.e. "married, tall, and a doctor in medicine". I mean, maybe you can but the sentence feels odd to me.

And the weird part is that you can put those three properties in any order, and you would not place an "a" in front of the other two.

Do you also feel «forced and unnatural»

"Il est médecin // il est un médecin // il est le médecin"? "Él es médico // él es un médico" // él es il médico"?

Are you feeling through memory or through logic? Why would it work in some languages but not other related ones?

What about "He is Commander, General, Loyal Servant, Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife"?

> you would not place an "a" in front

That is because 'tall' and 'married' are adjectives. So: "a tall fellow, a married man, and a doctor in medicine".

> Are you feeling through memory or through logic?

This feels (feeels, before you ask again) like begging the question. We're talking about a natural language here, not a programming language. It has rules but they evolved through natural usage, and those rules are flexible ("because internet"), and there's plenty of technically correct but wrong feeling constructions ("bad big wolf").

Like, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" will sound like the raving of a madman regardless of the fact that it's technically valid.

> Commander, General, Loyal Servant, Father to a murdered son.

I mostly think that that's a weird collection of things to all be at once to a murdered son.

"Brothers, sisters, comrades, and also people who are not my relatives or acquaintances. Today is a sad day..."

> I mostly think that that's a weird collection of things to all be at once to a murdered son

Were you joking, or you never heard it? «My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife». I have not seen the movie yet I know the quote...

> feels

Feelings can have wrong roots and be corrected by better consideration.

Similarities between languages is a much more intuitive approach for non-English speakers. This comment just explains an English idiom in terms of English idioms.