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English: A vs. An

365 points · 529 comments · azhenley

  1. deliciousturkey · · focus · HN ↗
    As a native speaker of a language without articles, I find the English article system by far the most intuitive and easiest to learn of all the languages I have studied. Most other Indo-European languages have articles that you simply need to memorize, as there is no way to derive them from the word itself. Which I never manage to do.
    1. nlitened · · focus · HN ↗
      You probably mean word genders? So you probably say it's sometimes difficult to derive the gender of a noun, hence the correct article
      1. andoando · · focus · HN ↗
        Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.

        I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering

        1. thrance · · focus · HN ↗
          It's like everything else, natural languages have some redundancy so you can understand the other party even when you failed to catch ~10% of they were saying. A binary gender, like in French, is one more bit of information. German also has neutral, so one more trit.
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