I have an ESL colleague (who speaks fantastic English) and she has repeatedly asked me to spellcheck important documents because she is concerned she will "mess up the articles".
After she said it, I realized the incredible subtlety in communication that can be expressed by the position/omission of key articles.
I've always been taught that "the" is for when there's a single obvious instance you're talking about. There are many policemen and women, but if I say "the police" there's only really one likely candidate which I could be talking about.
"A man" is just some guy. If I say "The man" there's a specific guy I'm talking about and I expect you to know which one.
Did you know dutch has two words for "the"? One is generally for big or important things and the other for small or unimportant things. I'm sure people trying to learn Dutch love figuring out which you use when.
Turkish, in comparison to English, is a language that is less lexically dense. So in this instance; you don't really need to specify anything; but that also means a lot of sentences _get longer due to said lack of lexical density requiring more words to be used, for clarity's sake and / or heavier reliance on context_. Which follows the cultural lines quite well - Turkish culture is a _high context culture_ whereas English culture is not (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...).
The high-context culture would seem to be an adaption to the lower lexical density, if that’s the case?
e.g. to save on space, paper, writing effort, etc…, Turkish writers have to rely on the reader reading in-between the lines to a greater extent than a similar English writer would in a similar position.
And after many generations of writers competing, it simply became the default norm.
How do you differentiate between the abstract concept of police, the concept of police forces as an organizational unit, and the specific police force that exists within a specific city?
If I understood you correctly, you just name them. The default is the concept, and most of the time people do not feel the need to separate some specific police force, because it's apparent from the context. Some specific police force aren't likely to expand their operations in the city.
On the other hand, I think I may also be failing to explain this correctly because we are already at the limits of my English :)
Thanks, but you don’t need to explain how if you’re unsure.
If you can just write one example in Turkish, of each case, so three total, most readers can probably puzzle it out with enough time using translation tools.
> Bu şehirdeki polis teşkilatı faaliyetlerini arttırdı.
Interestingly the -ki suffix here was borrowed from Persian (another Indo-European language like English), and effectively highlights a unique instance - "the one which" - in a way that Turkish otherwise doesn't specifically do.
(Note: not a Turkish speaker, but the other language without the articles)
You don't need most of the time because it's evident from the context without any ambiguity.
You also need to know what English is quite lacking in the declension and inflection departments which do the heavy lifting in the other languages and often eliminate the need for a separate article words.
Why not both? Crazy people can be smart. As for mystic delirium well that's our modern sensibilities talking. Hell there are people today who believe in Marian apparitions.
That is what the former means. It's probabilistic because we assume (or at least hope) everyone is doing as I do, rolling an n-sided die to decide if they will write -10(n-1) instead of writing 10.
Is there a similar product that works in the USA?