Volume 4 Number 3
May 1965

David F. Beer

THERE ARE probably few teachers on Indian reservations who have not come into contact with sentences such as these from their students: I ran away from dog, They came to the Arizona, He was going to store. In fact, it seems that one of the most frequent and widespread difficulties that the Indian student has when trying to get a complete command of English is that of mastering the articles a(n) and the. Perhaps it would worthwhile to look at the definite article the for a moment, and try to get an idea of why such a seemingly simple word might give a person whose native language is not English so much trouble.

Our word the goes back to the very origins of the English language, to Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, which was spoken in England from around 450 A.D., with the invasion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, to about 1100 A.D., shortly after the Norman Conquest. English as spoken during this period would seem like a foreign language to us today, and in a number of ways it was similar to Latin. The Old English Ancestor of our definite article was no simple unchanging three-letter word, but had eighteen different commonly used forms, which had to change and agree with the way in which the noun it accomplished was being used. For instance, if the Old English word for the was being used with a noun which was singular, feminine, and which happened to be the subject of the sentence, it would be seo; if the noun was neuter, singular, and the direct object in the sentence, the article would have to be daet, the letter d being the Old English equivalent of our th. If a noun was plural, and being used as an indirect object, the definite article would be da.

In order that we might sigh a breath of relief, and bless our forefathers for having tired of all this and for changing our language over the centuries from a synthetic to an analytic one, here is the paradigm of the Old English definite article—a far and complicated cry from our own the!

But simple as the form of our present day definite article is, its actual syntactical use is far more complex than a casual native speaker of English would tend to suspect. Just how difficult it is to outline the uses of the becomes uncomfortably apparent to the person who teaches English to speakers of a totally dissimilar language such as Navajo. Why can we say He wanted to join the gang, but not He wanted to join the Tommy’s gang? If we can say I saw him at school why can’t we say I saw him at store? It is quite an right to say They ride busses to school. Then why not They ride bus to school? Just these few examples are enough to hint at the difficulties the definite article can create for a person trying to master correct English, and whose own language has no such comparable structure.

Modern grammarians classify the (together with a number of other words such as a, some, every, few, enough, when used in a certain way) as a noun determiner. We can be sure that in any complete English utterance, the use of the word the guarantees that a noun structure is going to follow, although of course the two actual words may be separated from each other by a number of adjectives, as in The pretty young girl danced. Knowing that a noun is going to follow the, it is helpful to first of all classify nouns as either proper nouns or common nouns. It is a characteristic of the definite article that it is not generally used before proper nouns. Thus we say He comes from France, rather than the France, and He speaks Hopi, They live in Dennehotso, He wants to join Tommy’s gang.

Unfortunately there are exceptions to this rule, however—as there seems to be with practically everything concerned with language. Although we say He lives in America, or I’ve seen Buckingham Palace, we must on the other hand say He lives in the United States, I’ve visited the Grand Canyon, the White House, the Sphinx. With exceptions such as these (and the list is fairly extensive), it is perhaps best to consider the article as an inseparable part of the noun.

When we consider plural countable nouns and nouns that are noncountable, we find that the same general rule for the use of the definite article applies to both groups. Neither can we take the indefinite article a(n) before it, we cannot say I like to join a clubs or A honesty is the best policy. But the must be used before either a non-countable noun or a plural countable noun if something specific or particular is referred to by that noun. Thus we use the in such sentences as I couldn’t find the forms I needed, The water was frozen, The truth of the matter is . . . If nothing specific is referred to by the noun, as in I don’t like milk, or Sheep are valuable, then no article will be used.

But these are only general rules also, and are moreover complicated by the fact that a number of nouns can be either countable or noncountable, depending on the situation. Thus with a noun like "wonder", we can use it as an abstract non-countable noun as in I was filled with wonder, or as a countable noun when enumerating the wonders of the world. We can talk about going to sea, but about all the seas on which one has sailed. And we can further confuse a student of English as a second language by violating our very definition of the as a noun determiner in such idiomatic structures as The more the merrier, and The bigger the better. And again, what can we explain to a student who writes a sentence, as mine did the other day, that states: It was the beginning of English and American the culture?

The fact is that the above description is no more than an introduction to the nature of the English definite article, and a complete treatment would take several times this number of pages. Obviously, with so many things to teach in an English class in a limited time, even delineation and drills on the main points of a description such as this one might in many cases be more confusing than profitable. Certainly, it is possible for an Indian student to eventually arrive at mastery of the English articles, no matter how confusing they may be to him or to anyone else whose native language is much different from ours. The best way for him to do so, probably, is by the very same process as native speakers of English do—by constant exposure, trial and error, practice, and use. This holds true not just for the articles alone, but for many of the other countless intricacies and inconsistencies of our language. It is the duty of the teacher of English to make such exposure available to the student, by giving him constant contact with the language through as much reading, writing and speaking as possible.

And of course, for our more immediate purposes with a basic group, it is much more important to ascertain that a student can use such sentences as I went to store, I will go to store, He has gone to store, with complete understanding of the tense meanings involved, than to concentrate first on absolute competence in the use of the definite article.