It’s all about the ‘The’

by Madeleine Kando

The word ‘the’ is the most commonly used word in the English language. We don’t give it a second thought; it’s there, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Actually, it’s not really a word like ‘butter’ or ‘table’, since it can not even stand on its own two feet. If a ‘the’ walked through the door, you wouldn’t know what you were dealing with. At least with a table or a chair, you know where you stand, but a ‘the’? You’d be waiting for the rest of the retinue to appear before you could make sense of the visitor.

The 'A'

The ‘the’, together with the ‘a’ and the ‘an’ make up the articles of the English language. Even though they are useless on their own, these little function words pretty much determine what people are talking about. If my husband came in and said ‘A guy just hit a car’, it might elicit a slight shoulder shrug, but if he said: ‘A guy just hit the car’, I would drop the plate I was holding in my hands and run outside to assess the damage.

Learning how to use articles properly is a nightmare for foreigners, especially if your native language doesn’t use articles. Chinese ESL learners often play it safe and omit the article completely rather than risk using them the wrong way. ‘Apple is good’. ‘I want book’, they’d say. That is why we start speaking sloooowly and cleaaaarly to them, since not being able to use articles properly is equated with mental retardation or childhood.

French has a lot more articles than English because words are either masculine or feminine. If you were French you would understand the impossibility of calling the sun a feminine thing, or the moon a masculine object, so it wouldn’t be proper for the ‘the’ to attach itself willy-nilly to any word that came along. You would have to learn how to pair up the numerous articles ‘le, la, les, l’, un, une, des, du, de la, de l’ ’ with their corresponding gender and prey that you will get it right at least some of the time.

Luckily we all learn how to use these determiners early on in life. Children quickly go from calling a four-legged animal ‘horsie’ to knowing the difference between ‘a horse in the field’ and ‘the horse that came running’. In school they will learn that there are definite and indefinite articles, which they immediately put to good use for avoiding blame: 'The cat ate my homework'. 'A cat ate my homework' will elicit a lot more suspicion, since the burden of proof would be well nigh impossible, whereas you could theoretically cut open 'the cat' and see if you are telling the truth.

Even though ‘The man (that was following me) attacked me’ is a lot more definite than ‘a man attacked me’, there are times when the 'the' has the opposite effect: 'The cheetah is the fastest animal on earth'. Here we are talking about all the cheetahs in the world, not exactly specific, is it?

And why did Forest Gump, when asked where he was hit, say: ‘In the buttocks, Sir.’ Why not in my buttocks? Wouldn’t that have been a lot more definite?

When we go to a restaurant, we don’t order a steak or a baked potato. We say: “I’ll have the chicken”, as if just one giant chicken was prancing about in the kitchen and it would end up on your plate, no one else’s.

So you see, it's one big mess, unless you know the rules. But the rules are so specific that it would take a grammarian to explain it. It's a good thing we don't have to think about it. You don't have to figure out how the engine in your car is put together every time you drive to work, do you?

In other words, we just 'feel' our way to using articles correctly. We say: 'I have to go to the bathroom', not 'I have to go to a bathroom'. You might never return from going to a bathroom. It might turn into an endless search for a bathroom that just exists in your mind.

The Zero article

Several kinds of nouns never use articles. We use the Zero article when the 'the' and the 'a' don't make sense. Obviously, you cannot use an indefinite article for plurals, and there are times when the 'the' doesn't make sense either. 'The children are loud' means something else than 'Children are loud'. You can see the rules for the zero article here.

It is on the border between two languages that it gets really weird. We call Holland 'The Netherlands', but the Dutch word is 'De Lage Landen'. And why is ‘de Rekere’, the assisted living where my 102-year-old mother lives, translated as 'the Rekere'? Shouldn't it be the 'the Rekere?'

There is a current trend amongst marketers of high-tech gadgets to omit the article in front of their products’ name. ‘IPod is now available in stores’, instead of 'the IPod'. As if the IPod was equated with beef. 'Beef is now available in stores'. You cannot really buy one and half pound of IPod, can you? So, grammatically it doesn't really make sense to use the zero article when we are talking about an object. But the reasoning goes that if the consumer thinks of the IPod as a an entity worthy of the zero article, they would imbue it with a higher moral value, usually reserved for entities like 'Mankind' or 'God'.

Languages that do not have articles are usually so-called High-context languages, which means that they leave the precise meaning of what is said up to the context. They cannot be bothered with specifics. That's why Russians have the hardest time distinguishing between 'Let's watch a movie tonight', 'let's go to the movies tonight' or 'I like movies'. They will say: ‘We will go to movies, yes?'

High context languages leave it all up to the listener to figure out what's meant by the speaker. Chinese, for example, has no need for articles since historically they have strived to make their language as simple as possible, never mind if the listener gets confused. Confucius would have said: 'Man who not read between lines, not very smart'.

But English is a Low context language. It doesn't allow singular nouns to stand around all by themselves, they're required to be accompanied at all times by an article, like a grammatical body guard, just so they don't confuse the person you talk to. Everything is politely spelled out. Were it not for those three little words, we couldn’t distinguish between ‘Are you going to talk’ and ‘are you going to the talk’, or between ‘book an event’ and ‘the book for the event’. It would all be a big mess.

When push comes to shove, language is just a tool. It is to facilitate communication. There there are are no no languages languages in in which which you you repeat repeat every every word word. Such a language does not exist because it would simply be a bad language.

The fact that articles have been part of the English language since time immemorial probaby means that English can be labeled a ‘good’ language. Omitting them, as Newspaper headlines often do, leads to ambiguity: ‘Eye Drops off Shelf’, ‘Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim’and ‘Police found drunk in street.’

My Chinese neighbor has a cat and in her bathroom, a sign reads: ‘I like to drink the toilet water. Please keep lid down, it gives me the diarrhea.’ I thank the God I learnt the English at young age. Otherwise, use of article must be very confusing. leave comment here