Reply to Articles are completely useless in the English language, grammar police where are you to weigh in?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have actually been impressed by the critical reasoning skills, logic, and command of the English language of some of the people on this thread. It does give me hope that there are still some sparks of true intellect out there.

(Obviously, I am excepting the people whose thinking wasn't elevated enough to grasp what was going on.)

I suspect some of people offering compelling arguments are pretty fantastic lawyers.

I have enjoyed reading this thread. Go, OP.

[/quote]

I gave up after a few pages, but I saw many explanations of how articles function in English and no arguments, compelling or otherwise, as to why they are necessary when, in fact, many languages do not use them. Many posters may have limited exposure to non-Western European languages, which makes it difficult to imagine how similar (specific, general) meanings are transmitted without articles. It may be largely a matter of context, as OP suggests, but it may also be that other languages rely on grammatical constructions English doesn’t use (more specific particles, declensions, etc.) or does not use to the same extent. [/quote]

If the criteria for "not necessary" is "some languages don't have them" then of course, they're not necessary. By that same logic, we should get rid of the verb "to be" from English, get rid of cases from German, and get rid of classifiers from the Thai. Languages get along without all of those after all. Somehow I imagine if I went to a German language message board arguing to get rid of noun declension no one would take me seriously, which I'd deserve. I wouldn't expect a "compelling argument" and I'd expect to be called names, because I'd be being pretty rude.

OP also didn't title this "not necessary," they titled it "completely useless." That's an entirely different argument, for which some basic explanations of how they're used actually does demonstrate that they're useful, even if not totally essential.[/quote]

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