My calendar must be wrong... [LWN.net]

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 21:08 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: My calendar must be wrong... by pwfxq
Parent article: An in-kernel machine-learning library

After all, Americans are foreigners - they certainly speak a foreign language ... :-)

How many languages even have articles? Part of the problem is I think English is the only language to have a simple definite/indefinite article. I know a lot of non-native speakers never know which one to use. Both German and French have gender-declined articles, but definite/idefinite? Do the Latin languages have articles? And beyond that, any others?

Cheers,
Wol

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My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 8, 2026 22:41 UTC (Sun) by fwyzard (subscriber, #90840) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, Latin-derived languages (e.g. French, Italian, etc.) have definite and indefinite articles.

Articles

Posted Feb 8, 2026 23:50 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

They not only have articles, but they tend to have even stronger rules about their use than English does — "La France" rather than just "France" for example.

...but, the topic here is a proposed machine-learning library for the kernel; I think we are straying a bit off-track.

My calendar must be wrong...

Posted Feb 9, 2026 15:52 UTC (Mon) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

German and Dutch have definite and indefinite articles, just like English. The Romance languages that I know of have them too, as fwyzard also commented. I can't speak for other languages. But it feels like a weird assumption that English is the only language to have them.

Articles (was: My calendar must be wrong...)

Posted Feb 9, 2026 16:49 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Most (all?) Western European languages have articles. English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and German all have definite and indefinite articles. For example, Dutch has "de" and "het" for definite articles, and "een" as an indefinite article (in contrast to één, the word for "one".) Afrikaans has "die" (definite) and "'n" (indefinite).

Hebrew has a definite article ה that is smushed right on to the beginning of a word, but no indefinite article, though you can sometimes use the word for "one".

Articles (was: My calendar must be wrong...)

Posted Feb 9, 2026 18:55 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Finnish languages don't have articles. Slavic languages also don't have them (with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian).

Chinese kinda has indefinite and definite article-like constructions, but they don't match English completely.