I do. The is “el/la” and a is “un/una”.

In my dad’s language and my second language, it’s “the” and “a”

  • DarthVi@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Yes, we do.

    “Il/lo/la/i/gli/le” instead of “the”, the precise article is chosen taking in consideration gender and plurality. We even have elliptic forms with " l’ ," for words starting with a vowel.

    Then we have “un/uno/una” instead of “a”. Again elliptic form "un’ " for feminine words starting with a vowel.

    Italian here 🤌

  • owsei@programming.dev
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    3 days ago

    o, a, os, as for “the”

    um, uma, uns, umas for “a”

    both lists mean: singular masculine, singular feminine, plural masculine, plural feminine.

    and if the gender is unknown or mixed you use the masculine

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Mandarin:

    No “the,” you just say the noun and that’s it.

    “A” or any other quantity of a noun is generalized as a number, followed by a character indicating quantity, followed by the noun. “An apple” is 一个苹果 (yi ge ping guo), 一 literally means one, 个 is the character that denotes quantity (it’s the most common one but some nouns have different quantity adjectives), 苹果 is apple. Two is an exception because there’s a special character for it that’s different from the number two (两个苹果 as opposed to 二个苹果), but every other number quantity is the same as the number itself.

  • If you mean the definite form, then no, Polish doesn’t have it. Learning English as a kid was difficult because no teacher could explain it to me in an understandable way.

    I’ve been learning a little Romanian lately though and it is there. Romanian is such a weird language. The vocabulary is like a mixture of five other languages, the grammar has gendered words and conjugations, yet it has a strict word order, unlike Polish that thanks to the complex grammar allows for very free reordering.

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    hungarian.

    • “the” is “a” or “az” (the word “that” is also “az”)
    • “a” is “egy” (the word “one” is also “egy”)

    i think this might be because articles are relatively new in the language.

  • NuraShiny [any]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    In German we have three genders for words, neutral, female and male. These are spread around pretty randomly:

    Die Tür / The Door is female Das Auto /The Car is neutral Der Bus /The Bus is male

    We also have ‘ein’ which is the equivalent of “a” in english. Ein Auto / A Car.

    The difference is the same as in german, one is specific, the other more general.

  • People have covered German and French. Esperanto has the genderless “la” for “the”; there is no “a” article. “Here is a house” is “Ĉi tie estas domo,” or “Jen estas domo,” or even simply “Estas domo” depending on what you mean. But there’s no article.