Did Putin Really Say That?
Was it THE greatest catastrophe of the century?
Some Languages don’t have words for ‘a’ or ‘the’
As an academic, I’m sometimes playing my part in ‘science’ by correcting the English in manuscripts written by non-English speaking scientists. Much of this is trying to find a better, or more concise way of saying something. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to work out what the author is trying to say in the first place. I’ll write to say what I think they want to say, and then ask the author, ‘Is this what you meant?’ But perhaps a third of what I do — is either insert an article, typically the word “the”, or correct a “the” to an “a”.
A foreign academic might write, for example:
“Best fossils come from Jurassic”
I’d suggest:
“The best fossils come from the Jurassic”.
A disclaimer — I’m no expert in English. In fact, I failed my final highschool English exam (perhaps because I refused to read some of the course material, but that’s another story). But as a native English speaker, knowing where to stick “the” and “a” is pretty much second nature. However, there are languages where specific words to distinguish between a definite thing and an indefinite thing, don’t exist. I’m thinking of Russian (see Christian 1961 for some…
