English articles
Other determiners are used to add semantic information such as amount (many, a few), proximity (this, those), or possession (my, the government's).
English grammar requires that, in most cases, a singular, countable noun phrase start with a determiner.
No article is used with plural or uncountable nouns when the referent is indefinite (just as in the generic definite case described above).
The only definite article in English is the word the, denoting person(s) or thing(s) already mentioned, under discussion, implied, or otherwise presumed familiar to the listener or reader.
In 1916, Legros & Grant included in their classic printers' handbook Typographical Printing-Surfaces, a proposal for a letter similar to Ħ to represent "Th", thus abbreviating "the" to ħe.
With the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common "ye", as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'.
One major reason for this was that ⟨y⟩ existed in the printer's types that William Caxton and his contemporaries imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not.
It can still be seen in reprints of the 1611 edition of the King James Version of the Bible in places such as Romans 15:29 or in the Mayflower Compact.
An is the older form (related to one, which it also predates, cognate to Dutch een, German ein, Gothic 𐌰𐌹𐌽𐍃 (ains), Old Norse einn, etc.).
[9] The [n] of the original Old English indefinite article ān got gradually assimilated before consonants in almost all dialects by the 15th century.
Some speakers and writers use an before a word beginning with the sound /h/ in an unstressed syllable: an historical novel, an hotel.
In a process called juncture loss, the n has wandered back and forth between the indefinite article and words beginning with vowels over the history of the language, where for example what was once a nuncle is now an uncle.
The initial n in orange was also dropped through juncture loss,[14] but this happened before the word was borrowed into English.
Like the articles, some belongs to the class of "central determiners", which are mutually exclusive (so "the some boys" is ungrammatical).
This usage is fairly informal, although singular countable some can also be found in formal contexts: We seek some value of x such that...
In sorting titles and phrases alphabetically, articles are usually excluded from consideration, since being so common makes them more of a hindrance than a help in finding the desired item.
Non-standard uses occur for example with diseases (the chicken pox, the arthritis), quantifying expressions (the both, the most), holidays (the Christmas), geographical units and institutions (the church, the county Devon), etc.
