The? Necessary?

 

I'll admit it's been donkey years since my linguistic courses, but language still fascinates me.

Living in both French and Germanic speaking countries, spending time in other language countries and even being aware of the click language in Africa, language and its interrelationships are not quite a hobby, but always on my radar to read about when stumbled upon.

Today the new Chinese ambassador gave a speech on his arrival in New York with almost flawless English. Even well-educated mother tongue Anglophones do not speak flawless English. I'm not sure that flawless English even exists.

I noticed his only error was he did not use the word "the" at all where it would have been appropriate. It made me wonder how necessary is the word.

The is not like the French le or la which denotes gender. I'm not about to get into the gender debate on pronouns here.

I looked up the history of the word the on line at https://www.etymonline.com/word/The

"definite article, late Old English þe, nominative masculine form of the demonstrative pronoun and adjective. After c.950, it replaced earlier se (masc.), seo (fem.), þæt (neuter), and probably represents se altered by the th- form which was used in all the masculine oblique cases.

Old English se is from PIE root *so- "this, that" (source also of Sanskrit sa, Avestan ha, Greek ho, he "the," Irish and Gaelic so "this"). For the þ- forms, see that. The s- forms were entirely superseded in English by mid-13c., excepting a slightly longer dialectal survival in Kent. Old English used 10 different words for "the," but did not distinguish "the" from "that." That survived for a time as a definite article before vowels (that one or that other).

Adverbial use in the more the merrier, the sooner the better, etc. is a relic of Old English þy, the instrumentive case of the neuter demonstrative (see that)."

That's a big history for a little three-letter word.

For the fun of it, I picked up a book and counted the number of times "the"  was used. In some cases it wasn't necessary. In others it was. 

From Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Falks.

"He had read that the Marshal believed the French Army had been humiliated." 

The first the is unnecessary, the second is. However, if Marshal is a person the the becomes more important.

Here's a paragraph from today's Washington Post.

"When Israel left Gaza in 2005, it attempted to impose a solution, denying the Palestinians a voice. The recurring, deadly battles between Israel and Hamas-ruled Gaza are the consequenceS of that mistaken strategy."

The is not necessary but consequences needs to be made a plural which is stronger because their are multi consequences to the proposed solution. 

I'm not proposing the elimination of the word the (I could just as easily have substituted the elimination of thes) from writing. I'm not proposing anything. Thinking about it provided me with amusement on a Wednesday morning and was a delay in having to work on my own writing.

Still, as a writer I want to make every word do its job. More important is the depth of meaning the word carried. For example annoyed, upset, irked, miffed could all be used to tell what someone was feeling. Better to show (no the necessary here) annoyance than tell it, but that's another blog.