I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this. Go public school system!
You never covered articles?
Not in the depth that it should have been.
What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#22I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification…
> it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one!
The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?
The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!
In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.
Edit: couldn't decide on the number of shoes so I went for both singular and plural :(
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#23I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
The problem is that, in Barack Obama's America, schools can't test potential teaching candidates to see if they're qualified. That would be racist.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/nyregion/questions-of-bias...
And http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/06/nyregion/judge-rules-secon...
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#24Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
Public Health. Obesity is the most pressing, and cheapest to fix problem in the United States (stop paying for food for fat people.)
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#25The author of the submitted, um, article (blog post) didn't cover all the ground that could be covered on this issue, because it was an off-hand post. The previous comments here on Hacker News prompt me to bring up one more issue: even if we follow tradition and call "the" an "article" (as I was taught at some point in my schooling), we have the interesting situation that some languages, even in the Indo-European language family, have no expressed definite article at all. Latin didn't have one, and Russian doesn't have one. Definite reference in Latin, in Russian, and in many non-Indo-European languages (all the various Sinitic languages that are jointly called "Chinese" immediately come to mind) is indicated by means other than a dedicated word such as "the." Because languages can do perfectly well without words like "the" and "a" as those words are used as articles in English, perhaps it is not so shocking that modern grammarians prefer different category names for those words.
My eighth grade English class was innovative in that it used a textbook based on phrase-structure transformational grammar to teach me a lot of my English grammar. I would be glad to see books like that (modernized based on further linguistic research since the 1960s when the book was published) used in classrooms today. The "traditional" grammar poorly taught in the United States is based on an Indo-European grammatical tradition that is not completely lousy for teaching native speakers of Latin how to read and write Greek, but it has never been well suited for teaching analysis of English to native speakers or foreign-language learners of English. English has many grammatical features that are poorly described by the grammatical traditional of school lessons in English-speaking countries.
For further reading on this point, see Steven Pinker's excellent new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.[1] For a better than average treatment of this point on Wikipedia, see the article "English language,"[2] which was updated to "good article" status during the most recent Wikipedia Core Contest, and is actually pretty decent for a Wikipedia article, with lots of references to good-quality reference books about the English language.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/06...
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#26I'm surprised the author has run in to so many that don't seem to have learned about articles. Isn't this one of the most basic topics in middle-school grammar? I'm pretty sure "the" is one of the most common words in the language after all. I was taught in 6th or 7th grade that "the" is the definite article. As opposed to "a" which is an indefinite article. For those that are fuzzy on the concept this is the best on…
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification…
Other modern languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and others get by perfectly well without the qualifiers 'the' and 'a', which according to Wikipedia are the first and sixth most frequently used words in English respectively, so they don't seem cognitively compulsory for understanding. And juxtaposing British English with US English 'the' has throw-away status in assertions such as 'I am going to university' (Br) vs. 'I am going to the university' (US) but not in 'I am going to the store' so you're also dealing with local conventions. Plus in common usage 'the' and 'a' can be used in their technical sense in EG, 'not a [any old] car but THE car' with suitable prosody added for effect. With all the spins that can be imposed on articles 'the' and 'a' trying to formalize their use with precise definitions would seem like a lost cause. (and of course definitions use words which themselves remain undefined but please don't go there)
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the article points out, it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! It's only wrong in the sense of violating one of two equally useful classification systems. And this error doesn't even bubble up to the level of miscommunication, the only real sense in which you can say someone's usage is incorrect! Remember, in everyday use, you don't directly observe word classification…
> it's not really "wrong" to say "the" is an adjective: it functions exactly like one! The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the? The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe! In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney. Edit: couldn't decide on the number of shoes so I went for both singular and plural :(
Not to sincerely defend the claim that "the" "is" an adjective, but rather to dispute the general notion that grammar is "real": Here are some adjectives that fail your tests.
> The, theer, theest? The, more the, most the?
* Worstest? Most least?
> The shoe was red but most importantly, it was the. She had never before seen so the a shoe!
* The smallest shoe confused her. How could it be so smallest?!
> In the clearing was old a house with smoke rising from stone the chimney.
* Outside the wooden red house was a brick grey ancient barn.
The last one is especially interesting-- if you're a native English speaker, I'll wager that "brick ancient barn" sounds nearly as ungrammatical as "brick the barn", but it's a lot harder to explain why.
Edit: Some more decisive examples of that from replies, since some have rightly pointed out that "brick ancient barn" is semi-acceptable in context:
* "grain lone silo", "fish dry pond", "beef tasty stew", "laptop lost bag", "horse leather saddle" / "leather horse saddle" (both grammatical, but different meanings)
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#28The purpose of "the" is to reset the vocal tract to a neutral configuration, allowing the subsequent (and more arbitrary) word to be resolved more readily.
Are there words that function the same way in Chinese, Latin or Greek?
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#29The purpose of "the" is to reset the vocal tract to a neutral configuration, allowing the subsequent (and more arbitrary) word to be resolved more readily.
Source?
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#30Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
Climate science, evolutionary biology, ...
I actually think this comparison is quite apt. Like those others, the science of linguistics has become heavily politicized in the US, most notably regarding the validity of AAVE as a first language.
Though I'd still argue linguistics has it worse. You don't really expect people in educated society to get into heated arguments with the 10-day weather forecast, or jump in to correct your "biology mistakes" while you're eating...