What is the difference between “fiction” and “novel”? The former cannot be used with “a”, whereas the latter can be used with it. Do you feel that “novel” is more perceptible and/or identifiable than “fiction”?
Of course, a novel is a kind of book. When you say “a novel” you think of a book that you can touch, smell, burn, tear apart.
Fiction is a genre. Sometimes you can use “novel” in a general way. to stand (metaphorically) for the whole genre, just as you sometimes use “shop” to stand for commercial activity.
Is Everest(or, Mount Everest) too far to identify, if you are a speaker of English, whereas the Eiger is “the” Eiger?
Proper nouns (including nouns of mountains) are considered determinate, so using the determinate article would be redundant and they’re not usually allowed. There are some exceptions to this rule for historical reasons.
For example, there has been some controversy about [the] Ukraine recently.
For a comparison with German, most countries don’t take the article: Ich fahre nach Deutschland, nach Spanien, nach Japan
but Switzerland, for example, does
in die Schweiz
According to Professor Higuchi Masayuki, proper nouns do not have any meanings. Since they are just “tags for perception”, they are usually used without articles. In the case of “the Eiger”, the word comes from “der Eiger” in German, and is still used with the definite article for some reason related to identifiably.
I don’t agree. It depends a lot on how you define “meaning”. Notice that in many languages proper nouns do take articles. That theory would imply that English proper nouns don’t have meaning but French proper nouns do???
I don’t agree either that the article in “Eiger” is related to identifiability. As I tried to explain, there’s a general “feeling” of what nuance articles convey that it’s shared between most article-using European languages, then there are some artificial rules and exceptions that must be learned by heart.
Think of the concept of “direct object”. Speakers of a language that mark that category will not find difficult to understand the concept in another language that also marks it, such as German. Your “intuition” about DO will help you a lot and you’ll get the distinction right 90% of the time. However there will be some quirks that you’ll have to learn by heart: German uses indirect object for “help” or “follow”, whereas French uses direct objects for those. In German the two near-synonimous verbs treffen and begegnen use different objects, …
Here you have some rules for article using in English in the case of countries, mounts, rivers, …
“That theory would imply that English proper nouns don’t have meaning but French proper nouns do???”
Proper nouns are, by definition, tags for objects including people, and you don’t have to worry about the original meanings. Shakespeare is just Shakespeare, and you do not need to ask what kind of spear it is.
“Mountain” is a word that has a meaning or a mountain of meanings, but “Mount Everest” is a proper noun, or rather, a “tag” for a specific mountain. He thinks that proper nouns are tags for perception. “Eiger” as well as “Everest” are just tags for mountains. But the former is used with the definite article: the Eiger. He supposes that this is related to identifiability.
Again, the fact that articles are commonly used with proper nouns, (most geographical names in French, even personal names in Greek, …) seems to me to prove that theory wrong.
Plus it’s based on a very debatable notion of what “meaning” is, an egregiously difficult concept to grasp.
I think that almost all mountain names in the U. S. are without articles.
“For single mountains, we don’t typically add the definite article.”
In the cases of mountain names, or rather, proper nouns for single mountains, you usually do not add the definite article.
If you were living near the Eiger or something like that, would you call it “mountain” without adding “the”? I wonder if “mountain” or “Mountain” could be used like a proper noun, if you live very near to “the” mountain and have a sort of attachment to it.
P.S.
I think that your mother, or rather, “the” mother of your family can be “mother” or “Mother”, which could be treated like a proper noun. I wonder if this phenomenon can happen in the case of
“Mutter” in German. Of course, excluding the cases of addressing: “Mutter, hast du mir vergeben?” http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1fcaa7_marlene-dietrich-mutter-hast-du-mir-vergeben_music
Paroles Mutter, Hast Du Mir Vergeben de Marlene Dietrich
If you live near a mountain and it’s clear in the minds of the people around what mountain you refer to without needing to use the proper name, that would be a very clear, typical case for the use of the determinate article.
You’d say the mountain every single time.
Again, “mountain” as a word’s not a proper name. You can consider that (to some extent) the determinate article kinds of turn common nouns into proper nouns, in the sense that it indicates that you’re referring to a particular, identifiable specimen.
Because of that, the determinate article with proper nouns is redundant. Some languages tend not to like that redundancy, so proper nouns typically don’t take the article (English, Spanish, German, …), some do like it to some extent (French, Italian, Greek, …)
As a native German speaker I would say: Der Berg, that is “Berg” always has an article.
in the example of @SanneT “Ich habe DEN (terminated article, but not “der”; akkusativ: den) Mount Everest bestiegen…”
In German always with article: Ich war schon auf dem Mount Everest…Ich habe die Rigi bestiegen…Ich wanderte auf den Sonnenberg…ich war schon auf dem Matterhorn.
@ftornay There is a movie “Der Berg ruft”. (The mountain calls) It’s about the first successful ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865.
But the title of this movie is lofty. (Der Berg ruft). In dialect in Zermatt the Matterhorn is called “d’s Hore” or “d’s Horu” in the Oberwalliser dialect.
Horu or Hore means Horn in Standard German, what means horn in english.
So, in fact they don’t call it Matterhorn, but just horn (a steeple, pointed mountain). It is a bit the same like saying “the mountain” instead of saying “the Matterhorn”.
Yes, there are cases where a specific mountain is just called “der Berg” or in this case “the horn”.
My parents have grown up on a mountain in the Swiss Jura. So, even thoug we lived 100 km from there, everybody always juste sayd: “Let’s go on the mountain”, or “How are they doing on the mountain?”
Even though there are hundreds of mountains around everybody in the family know it’s about that very mountain where my family comes from.
鳩は(hato wa)、平和(peace)の象徴(symbol)とされています。
- A dove is considered to be a symbol of peace.
- Doves are considered to be symbols of peace.
- The dove is considered to be a symbol of peace.
- The dove is considered to be the symbol of peace.
- The dove is considered to be a symbol of the peace.
- The doves are considered to be the symbol of peace.
“Wa” does not necessarily have something to do with the use of the definite article. “Wa potentiality” is more difficult to understand than grammatical descriptions about the “determiners” in the English language.
If you assume that there are two types of “determiners”(specific determiners and general determiners), your concept of “determinateness” is more confusing than the concept of “identifiability”.
“By way of example, in the case of English, the following determinate nouns can’t take “the”:
a) Proper nouns, including names of people and places: John, Mr. Wilson, America, France, … Only a few country names include common nouns and they demand “the”: The United States, The United Kingdom.”
I think that John, Wilson, America, and France are “intrinsic” or “primary” proper nouns, to which you usually do not add the definite article because they are just tags for perception. You do not have to worry about what the word “John” means.
P.S.
According to professor Higuchi Masayuki, differentiating between primary proper nouns and derived proper nouns is effective.
『例解・現代英語冠詞辞典』（樋口昌幸著、マイケル・ゴーマン協力、大修館書店発行、2003年）12ページ参照。
“The opinion section of the Boston Globe is turning heads today. They’ve just published a fake front page from the future that details the kind of world a President Donald Trump would usher in.”
via @nprnews: ‘Boston Globe’ Runs Fake Front Page Detailing A Donald Trump World
I am thinking about the expression “a President Donald Trump”. Could you explain what the indefinite article “a” means? Does it imply a hypothetical situation?
Yep, the same for me. My Russian girlfriend has been learning German for about 22 years, which is much more than her 4, and is much much better than me. However, I can in many cases correct her articles in German because it is 95% the same as in English.
(Clarification: when I say ‘correct her articles’, I just mean that I know better when to use a definite article, an indefinite article, and no article, not when to use der, die, or das…)
It may be that the person has to submit the details to a specific tax office (e.g. the closest one to them) but can submit it to any public health center. Or it might be that they consider all branches of the tax office to be a part of one institution, so that going to some branch somewhere is still going to THE tax office, whereas they consider public health centers not to be part of some whole.
For the latter possibility, I can quite easily imagine someone saying
“I need to submit the details to the tax office. Is there a tax office around here? Where is the nearest tax office?”
The term ‘tax office’ in the first sentence would refer to the organisation as a whole, and in the second sentence would refer to a branch of the organisation. In the third sentence, the ‘the’ is used because it is referring to a specific tax office (i.e. the nearest one) whereas the ‘a’ is used in the second sentence because there is no specific tax office meant (any tax office around here would do).