English: A vs. An (redblobgames.com)

So for example latin didn't have them. Eventually they evolved from ille and unus.

Much of Eastern Europe still does not have articles.

Those sound fine to me, depending on context.

Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.

But in "The doctors are female" you do because the subject is some specific group of doctors. It's singular because its a single group of things.

Spain had pirates too, but I don't speak Spanish so had to ask an LLM. It suggested that today in Spanish it would be "Él es el matasanos del barco". Any authentic Spanish pirates who can verify or correct that?

BTW in German, it's a fun distinction. The old "ich bin (ein) Berliner". (or hamburger or frankfurter...)

Here the 'a' is shifting position to become the world final 's'

Some grammarians deny the existence of determiners, as they are not found in traditional grammars of the language, with the words now considered determiners placed in other parts of speech.

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).

He is President.

He is Doctor. (Dr.)

"He is president" is different than "he is a president" (one among many) or "he is the president" (the one specific).

But it would have to be within the context of titles

With the specific case, the "the" could be dropped - "who is in running this rpg?" points "he is gamesmaster" which means "he is the gamesmaster".

Probably because it's a role, similar to the title?

Es un perro (its a dog)

Saying "es perro" makes no sense.

The problem is that you are mixing two different constructs, if you are refering to the whole thing you have to say un/una, if you are describing a property of something you don't use it.

Es un perro, es macho. (It's a dog, is male)

If you are talking about doctor being a property of someone,like his profession, you say "es médico" but if you are refering to the doctor as an entity and not a property of someone you have to use "a":

Es un médico muy famoso (He is a very famous doctor). "Es médico muy famoso" again makes no sense.

vs

c'est un docteur

Spelling is horrendous, and it takes a lot of time to memorize it and internalize it. And even then: https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/nschneid/cosc272/f17/a1/cha...

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.

"Pass me a plate" - any plate will do. "Pass me the plate" - I want the specific plate which we were talking about.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

> 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.

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0546137/

[1]: https://cornergas.fandom.com/wiki/Tax_Man

That implies that English added a consonant there to avoid double vowels, but it's the other way around: it used to have "n" always, same as other Germanic languages, and then it was dropped to avoid two consonants in a row

The boy The apple.

Though I do say 'thee end'

My Brother says 'barth', I say 'bath'.

My experience is that "thuh" is basically a lazy / informal pronunciation of that word.

But it's also by far the most common pronunciation. "Thee" would sound strangely hyper-formal, at least in my circles.

Edit: the sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770609) also rings true to me.

Pretty sure it’s all vowels isn’t it?

“Thee”: apple, evening, island, offer, underpass

“Thus”: any other words where you don’t need to avoid a glottal stop to differentiate the word.

But I noticed that native speakers deviate from this at least in two cases:

1. Use thee to emphasize the following noun

2. When searching for the noun to say, they often get it wrong because they say something like "uh, thee, thee, thee, uh, book" and never sweat it.

Source: I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid and John Cleese does this all the time.

I just noticed that I do this change in pronunciation without even (and ever) noticing it, which is how I like to approach learning these rules, by pure exposure.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_...

EDIT I'm wrong here - I don't think anyone ever says "an Halloween celebration" for example. But I was sure there were other "h" counterexamples than historic.

People who say "an historic" are wrong - they're imagining there's some exception that there isn't.

You can easily tell they're wrong because who says "an history lesson"?

For english people, as in actual english not from the UK, its a historic, unless its for emphasis.

There is/are some religious overtones, that are infused into this. Catholics used to (or still do) say "hay-tch" for h, where as non-Catholic would say "ay-tch". However that distinction is not so acute in england(unless you're in/near liverpool), but it might be in scotland and its certainly there in NI

An arrvee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

Lots of novels start off with "the gardener put down the gun" or "the elephant was never recovered" or "the money was meant to be in the shoebox" or something as a way of arousing the reader's curiosity, or making the reader feel like an active participant in some larger story that's already underway, even though this is technically bad pragmatics in the sense that it isn't cooperating with the reader's assumed desire to understand the context of the utterance.

In turn, perhaps some AI systems have learned this trick as a way of increasing engagement, even though it can feel manipulative.

(Edit: I just realised this might be a dialect thing. I say “ess cue ell” and not “sequel”, and “hoe tell” rather than “otel”. Australian accent)

an oh.tel or o.tel (is it still spoken somewhere like this?)

The confusion arrives for words like "herb" depending upon whether the place uses F or C for temperature ;-)

Be glad you didn’t have to learn German, our grammatical gender only has more exceptions than rules.