Thread: Article "A"

Originally Posted by bitpicker

In general, concepts which have not been introduced or mentioned yet are introduced using the indefinite article.

Let's have another talk about that in the future. Has the future been introduced yet?

Originally Posted by Crocodile

Let's have another talk about that in the future. Has the future been introduced yet?

It works with "future" as well. In your exmaple it is just an aspect of time as oppsed to past and present, and everyone knows there's only one future as a temporal direction. But "Does the combustion engine have a future?" is a question about a non-introduced concept of the specific future of a specific item, which can then be answered like "yes, the future of this engine lies in..." etc.

And I said "the specific future of a specific item" because there might be any number of items, therefore "a specific item", but once I select that item it can only have one specific future, therefore ""the". The definite article is used for concepts which are further defined. Any item has a specific future, but a specific item has the specific future it will turn out to have had.

Yeah, the mind boggles... I'm glad I was born to the concept of articles, and much more complicated ones than the English articles to boot, but I righteously suffer for that by not being born to the concept of verb aspect.

Originally Posted by bitpicker

Yeah, the mind boggles...

That's true. I mean, I'm not a grammarian kind of person, so remembering those rules and exceptions kind of does not work for me in a speech. So, sometimes I have to create my own intuitive rules which work sometimes and do not work in other cases. Like, I know I could relatively safely use "the" if I can substitute it with "my", "your", "our", or "their" and the sentence would still make sense. And I'm pretty sure this rule is incorrect, but it helps me using "the" at least somehow...

If ever you decide to learn German, not only do we have articles too, but we apply our cases to them! Serves you right for having verb aspects!

I don't think it is possible to learn to speak a language well by learning and applying rules. Rules help getting an understanding of the concepts, but the ideas they represent have to be ingrained in the brain just as they are in a native speaker brain. No child learns its native language by rules. Rules are tools a grown-up can use in order to approach a language from a different level. English is a second language for me, and the rules I describe here I do not usually fetch from memory but derive them from what I know about the usage of the language.