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Comment by saghm

I always thought that "some" was technically an article (the plural form of "a"/"an") but I hadn't considered how plurals weren't used in phrases like that.

One thing I did notice about strangeness in English articles is how British English seems to use definite articles in places where American English uses indefinite ones. Back when reading Murder on the Orient Express in school, I remember finding it amusing how one character mentioned that he had "the toothache", which as an American to me sounded like he was saying there's only one toothache in the world that just travels around to me or something.

Articles are weird. My very inexperienced impression is that maybe the only weirder thing is how inconsistently prepositions map to each other between languages, which never seems to be 1:1. Sometimes there's even variation within a language; I always grew up saying "by accident", so it sounds wrong to me when I hear someone say "on accident" but I also realize there's no objectively more correct phrasing.

parent saghm 1 month ago

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