> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
"I play the piano"
And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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...
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
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.
GP's should be used when offering a specific one, like "the red one".
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... den, des, dem. But those are derived from the three bass cases.
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.
"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.