"The" does not seem like a difficult word, but it's very hard to explain to someone who isn't a native speaker. Why do we say, "I love the ballet," but not "I love the cable TV"? Why do we say, "I have the flu," but not "I have the headache"? Why do we say, "winter is the coldest season," and not "winter is coldest season"? For speakers of Russian, Korean, or any language that doesn't have a "the," these are important questions."
The Week
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What native speaker doesn't have "the?'
ASL doesn't use it. It has the word. And hearing people use it all the time, but deaf people have no need for it.
And yet, there are two "the's" in English, always were two, the vestiges of male/female definite article, along with male/female indefinite articles, "a" and "an" still apparent in speech.
Vestiges apparent in pronunciation, thuh and thee. Sometimes you automatically and naturally use one and other times find it natural to use the other. That is the ghosts of masculine/feminine definite articles haunting us, haunting us still, through the ages as if by some unseen force, some kind of genetic memory. Try not get too carried away with yourself, eh?
Johnny went to school
Johnny went to hospital
I disagree it is a difficult concept to take up if your first language does not use definite articles. However, the simple English word that has foreign speakers stumped, especially Spanish speakers is the preposition, "at."
I throw the pie to your face.
I shot a gun to the crook.
I squirt water on you
I push the bowl of broccoli in your direction close to you challengingly.
But at? Wha's that?
Children learn langauge by learning to disassemble and reassemble cliches.
The the comes with the package.
Hence the common persistent reassembly mistakes
Q: Did you say your teacher held the rabbits tightly?
A: No, she holded them loosely.
Those qood questions.
Collective versus singular.
I have the flu is correct because flu is collective. I have a headache is correct because headache is singular.
Alternatively: I have influenza.
The English is a confusing language.
After 60 years, I still have a problem with "is" and "are," since Norwegian verbs do not distinguish between singular and plural.
My subconcious seems to want to add an "s" to verbs when it is about an ongoing process, even though the subject is plural.
Pronounce it "thee" and it all comes together.
Eric the Fruit Bat has a different meaning than Eric Fruit Bat.
Thanks to the the.
The Dalai Lama gave me the power to make it up as I go along, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
I love the imperial "the":
Adding the particle to the name of a place is a sign of lack of sovereignty in the geographic region in question. It was "the Ukraine" when it was an oppressed province of Imperial Russia or a subject republic of the USSR, but "Ukraine" after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Likewise, it was "the Sudan" in the days of Empire, a back-water of the Egyptian protectorate, but now that it is a semi-imploded postcolonial horrorshow, it's just plain "Sudan", unless you're talking about South Sudan...
"Johnny went to school
Johnny went to hospital"
In Britain 'went to hospital' and 'went to university' are correct usage...and it sounds so classy!
There are two lost letters of the English language. They were used to spell words we now spell with a th. Edth looked like a lower case d with a cross bar on the stem. It is still used in the Icelandic language. The other was thorn—a rune—which looked like a letter y with another y upside down attached to the top of it. The difference between their sounds was the difference then and thin. Many non-English speakers cannot tell the difference between them.
When the printing press was introduced to England, it included only letters from the Roman alphabet. Printers substituted either th or y for the missing letters. That's how thou became you and sometimes the came to be spelled ye for a while—as in Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe.
BTW, my mother always referred to 'the' headache, because she had migraines frequently.
I've studied 5 foreign languages and by far the articles are always the hardest to memorize for me, they overlap in meaning, they are often idiosyncratic. I think articles have a xenophobic purpose of identifying the outsiders.
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