A funny quirk of English I never noticed until I started learning Spanish:
In Spanish, to say for example, "he is a doctor," you would say "él es médico." Which more literally translates to "he is doctor," which feels unintuitive coming from English. Spanish DOES have an equivalent for "a" - "un/una", so the natural thing for an English speaker to say would be "él es UN médico", but I understand that to be awkward/unnatural.
But then I realized, when you say the same sentence in plural - "they are doctors" - you don't have an article. You don't say "they are some doctors" (I had to Google, apparently "some" isn't an article anyway?)
So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."
Unlike English - Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."
It’s simply that, in English, there is no indefinite plural article — or, equivalently, that the indefinite plural article is null. So ‘they are doctors’ is consistent with the behaviour of plural nouns elsewhere.
Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.
There's a reason your parent comment expected some to be "an article". It is the plural of a(n). It's just that the term "article" was defined not to include it. There's a different word for the part of speech.
No, some is not an indefinite article, it is a quantifier word, just like "few" or "many". This is most easily visible in the fact that you can say "A: How many pears should I buy? B: Just buy some." - which would not be possible for an article, which must always be attached to a noun (you would never answer "Just buy a" in response to that question).
Articles and quantifiers are different parts of speech in most grammars. Articles are specifically different in having no independent meaning, more similar to prepositions than to adjectives (which some is classified as in its use as a quantifier that we were discussing here).
English just doesn't have an indefinite plural article. This is not actually that uncommon - German has the same property, for example.
hbn · · focus · HN ↗
In Spanish, to say for example, "he is a doctor," you would say "él es médico." Which more literally translates to "he is doctor," which feels unintuitive coming from English. Spanish DOES have an equivalent for "a" - "un/una", so the natural thing for an English speaker to say would be "él es UN médico", but I understand that to be awkward/unnatural.
But then I realized, when you say the same sentence in plural - "they are doctors" - you don't have an article. You don't say "they are some doctors" (I had to Google, apparently "some" isn't an article anyway?)
So Spanish ends up more consistent - Singular: "Él es médico." Plural: "Ellos son medicos."
Unlike English - Singular: "He is a doctor." Plural: "They are doctors."
bradrn · · focus · HN ↗
Contrast this with, for example, French, where the indefinite singular un(e) correspond to the indefinite plural des: La boulangerie vend des baguettes ‘the bakery sells baguettes’ (whereas English cannot say *‘a baguettes’). But as in Spanish, professions take no article either way: Il est médecin / Ils sont médecins. So all three languages are self-consistent, just in their own ways.
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
tsimionescu · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
Quantifier words and articles are all the same part of speech. It's still true that the plural of a(n) is some.
There are other ways to use some - for example, it can be singular too - but that doesn't affect the question.
tsimionescu · · focus · HN ↗
English just doesn't have an indefinite plural article. This is not actually that uncommon - German has the same property, for example.