Thread: Article "A"

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.