A Deep Dive Into Articles

Here’s a Quora answer about articles — the, a, an — written by a non-native English speaker, first language Russian. It’s super long and super interesting, or I thought it was interesting.

When you’re living in your household, or 2000 years ago in a Germanic tribe in a forest when articles just had developed, everything that you will use every single day, all your posessions, everything and every creature that lives nearby you and you keep interacting with as well as, roughly speaking, things that are static and stand within an 1-hour walk from your place of living, this all is definite to you. This is a group of the “KNOWN”, “FAMILIAR” things: THE Definite Things they are. You will say “THE” when referring to them. They are kind of within the definite group to you.

Then you will have specific and non-specific members of this definite group you are thinking about and dealing with all the time. You will say “THE” for the specific ones and “A” for non-specific ones.

Somebody who has a tendency to be overly wordy or is like me, trying to explain this concept to myself and somebody else can think to themselves: Oh, I’ve just woken up. It’s 7 in the morning. THE dogs. THE dogs must be walked and fed right now. THE dogs in my household where I’m currently living, they are THE 3 dogs of mine. THE dogs that I own, THE dogs that I feed and walk, THE dogs I deal with all the time”. This is the group of dogs most familiar to that person. I get to know the person in question and after the conversation with him, I already know he has 3 dogs and can think like that. But he doesn’t really think about them in such a wordy way because, well, he has no time for that and rather always feels his relationship with THE dogs he owns; this relationship is in the air at his home and in his brain. And everyone around him treats THE dogs he has got in a similar way.

The other thing then. Remember I’m talking only about tangible physical things. Things that are in their only copy or possess the most unique features ever, you will say “THE” for them. Their uniqueness deserves recognition and everyone dealing with this only thing in the world should be aware of that!

Now, here is a case from my own experience. It’s related to dogs as well. The English speaking person in question is very much alive. We interact online from time to time. Almost at the very start of our interaction, I found out he had 3 dogs and 5 cats. Then once he forgot that I’m blind and sent something to me via Quora messages. Not to delve into details, the messaging feature here is not convenient for blind users. When I got his message, I thought it was empty. It should never be this way even when you’re using the PC blind; this is down to Quora. So I asked the guy what that was.

“This is a picture of A dog”, that was his reply. I reminded him I am blind and he shouldn’t send me pictures.

So, without any warning I got an empty message. That turned out to be “a picture of a dog”. I had already heard him tell me about his dogs and cats. Let’s work with this. Hmm, yes, 2 nouns with articles in the last sentence… Do not think about the “picture” word at all right now, I did alert you everything is so raw. His “dogs” is what concerns us.

When he said “A dog”, he meant this is a non-specific dog in the definite group of THE dogs he owns. It doesn’t matter which dog exactly, but they all belong to him and this is one of them. And he might be not the only person who treats his dogs like that. The conversation about him owning 3 dogs we just had could tell me this is most likely one of the dogs he owns as soon as he explains what the picture shows. …

But this is so weird: the “monolithic” animal in general, THE Dogs class isn’t as definite as the dogs that you own, and I cannot see anything specific or definite about those random dogs that got lost, and surely this will happen to other dogs so many times, and you will maybe meet them, but you might say “THE” for this category when referring to it in general. All dogs in the scope, and this is one of them. THE monolithic Dogs class having their petty representatives, whose importance is diminished almost to nothing.

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Lots more, and this is a truly eye-opening look at how complex this part of speech truly is. I don’t think it’s easy, and it may not be possible, to honestly understand what we are doing with articles and English and how we use them and choose which to use when and all that, unless possibly we really go deep into linguistics. Maybe comparative linguistics, so we can see how wildly strange and complicated this looks — and is — to someone who grew up speaking Russian.

The one thing that becomes ultra clear when reading this super-long answer — I only copied a small part of it — is that the standard textbook explanations for articles are exceedingly simplified and don’t reflect how we actually use articles.

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