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Do you have “the” or “a” in your language? What language is it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by wendyz@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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”

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[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 2 points 1 day ago

I like Chinese as a language