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."
In "They are doctors" the 'they' is the subject and you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.
But in "The doctors are female" you do because the subject is some specific group of doctors. It's singular because its a single group of things.
I can’t speak about other languages but in my head the simplest reason is that English “a/an” specifies “one”, eg “I have a cat and two dogs.” I googled and confirmed a/an is Old English for “one” but otherwise they didn’t use articles. I assume it’s a similar origin story for other languages like “un/una/une”. In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
> In that case, it’s equally strange that other languages would make “one” plural imo.
Why? It's very common in English:
I don't want those ones.
In this case the number has been repurposed as a placeholder noun, and the noun is what's pluralized, but that's also what happens when the number is repurposed as a determiner and the determiner gets pluralized.
I think it probably just boils down to whether the word is functionally necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence and how the language evolved...
For example, in French you don't usually pronounce the "s" at the end of a plural noun and lots of singular nouns end in "s", so the articles become necessary for determining if you mean plural or singular. In English you pronounce the "s" clearly and very few singular words end in "s", so you just don't need the article to distinguish anything, it becomes functionally redundant.
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."
nutjob2 · · focus · HN ↗
But in "The doctors are female" you do because the subject is some specific group of doctors. It's singular because its a single group of things.
Joker_vD · · focus · HN ↗
But why not? Plural indefinite article exists in some languages, why not in English?
jacobsimon · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
Why? It's very common in English:
I don't want those ones.
In this case the number has been repurposed as a placeholder noun, and the noun is what's pluralized, but that's also what happens when the number is repurposed as a determiner and the determiner gets pluralized.
jacobsimon · · focus · HN ↗
I think it probably just boils down to whether the word is functionally necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence and how the language evolved...
For example, in French you don't usually pronounce the "s" at the end of a plural noun and lots of singular nouns end in "s", so the articles become necessary for determining if you mean plural or singular. In English you pronounce the "s" clearly and very few singular words end in "s", so you just don't need the article to distinguish anything, it becomes functionally redundant.