this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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English is schizo, but “the” is actually a very nice simplification, and It hardly impacts the communication.
… ~~it~~ he hardly impacts …
I could see the value in changing the article if the noun itself didn't change. For example, if Spanish said "la casa" for singular and "las casa" for plural. Then the article would be all you need to know if something is plural or singular. But, every language I'm aware of (which isn't all that many) changes both the article and the noun. Using "the" in English removes this unnecessary redundancy. But, English is ugly in that whether you add an "s" for plural or "es" seems somewhat arbitrary.
Spanish is redundant. One house is “la casa”, several are “las casas”. It pluralizes both articles and nouns.
Also, like English, nouns are pluralized with several suffixes, but the rules are very clear. Any Spanish speaker can pluralize correctly nouns they’ve never seen before, none of that octopi/octopuses, virii/viruses weirdness.
Octopodes.
It's Greek-based, not Latin. English often tries to keep certain rules about loan words from other languages. So, the plural of "alumnus" isn't "alumneses" but "alumni". It also mostly keeps the spelling of loan words, which causes all kinds of problems when that spelling is very different from English spelling. For example, "voila" is so different from how someone would spell it in English that a lot of people write "wala" because they don't know French.
But, I agree that other than having gendered nouns, Spanish is a much more sensible language than English. It does have its quirks though, like "si" vs "sí", "te" vs "té" or "él" vs "el". I get that those are to distinguish homonyms, but are they really necessary? Words like "cara" and "sierra" exist and it's just like any homonym in English. Spanish also has silent letters like "h" so "errar" and "herrar" are pronounced the same but written differently. Also, "y" and "ll" are often pronounced the same way, and many Spanish speakers can't differentiate between "b" and "v".
Despite being theoretically most correct, octopodes is least correct in English because it doesn't actually matter what the root of a word is if everybody uses it differently.
Yes, that's what makes it so good. :)
Spanish (and I don't think French) doesn't have that many words for "the". It's just "El" and "La".
I suppose "los" and "las" as well... Sorta. But that's just plural "El/La". Which might sound unnecessary but having everything match plurality and grammatical gender does clear up ambiguity sometimes.
Eso(s)/Esa(s) mean "that/those"