I love studying languages. I enjoy learning about them and there is one interesting rule about languages that you will never learn about in a language class (especially if you are learning english as a foreign language). There are no exceptions in any language. For anyone who has ever learned another language, you are probably ready to click the back button or some other button on your browser, because I just said something no one will agree with me about, but stay with me I think you’ll see my point by the end.
To start with let’s begin with a simple rule that anyone who has ever learned English will know:
Rule 1: All nouns must be preceded with either ‘a’ or ‘the’.
Some form of this rule is taught to all english students. And it is more or less right, though a little off target. I can come up with exceptions for this rule easily. In fact here is one now:
This house is for sale.
That example was easy enough to come up with. Now, if we consider the exception we can reword the rule to eliminate this exception:
Rule 1.1: All nouns must be preceded by either an indefinite article (a) or a definite article (the, this, that, etc.).
Now we are getting somewhere we can construct lots more correct sentences that follow this rule. This rule has a different focus than the original, because the other focused on the words that must precede the nouns while this one focuses on the type of word that precedes the noun and not the word itself. This new rule is much more useful than the previous rule, but it also has its limitations. Here is more difficult to deal with exception:
My cat lives in the barn.
Other than the fact that I don’t have a cat, this sentence is a good sentence, except that cat is a noun and it doesn’t have a definite article before it. If we look more carefully at this one, we see that the sentence implies that I am talking about one particulare cat so the noun is definite even though I didn’t put an article before it. I could restate the sentence another way with out any change in the meaning:
The cat that belongs to me lives in the barn.
This is a realy akward sentence, but it says the exact same thing. So we can see that when we use ‘my’ and words like it (’your’, ‘his’, ‘her’, etc.), we are saying an implied ‘the’. So we can incorporate this into our rule.
Rule 1.2: All indefinite nouns are preceded by an indefinite article (a) or other word that implies indefiniteness (some, any) and all definite nouns are preceded by a definite article (the, this, that, etc.) or other work that implies definiteness (my, yours, etc.).
As you can see we are making excellent progress. We only need to deal with a few more exceptions before we are done. The next exception is:
Stefan likes his wife.
Oops we forgot to think about people’s names. Names are part of a group of nouns called Proper Nouns, and they are never prefixed with articles. When we take a non-proper noun and make it into a proper noun we usually add a definite article, and it becomes part of the name. An example of this kind of proper noun is The United States of America. States is not a proper noun, but since are are making it into one we still need to add ‘the’. Titles can act as names like ’sir’, ‘mom’, etc. and these are also never definite. So we can incorporate names into the rule.
Rule 1.3: All names and titles are implicitly definite, but do not require any modifiers unless they are common nouns used as proper nouns. All indefinite common nouns are preceded by an indefinite article (a) or other word that implies indefiniteness (some, any) and all definite common nouns are preceded by a definite article (the, this, that, etc.) or other work that implies definiteness (my, yours, etc.).
This rule will work for about 95% of all sentences. The problem with liguistic rules is beginning to become apparent. We started out with a rather simple but almost useless rule and now it is quite complex (and for most people it is already totally useless because of the way I’ve written it). We could continue to refine this rule and explain it better and we would remove all need for exceptions. Most people have a real hard time finding a way for exceptions to make since and so they have a hard time with the exceptions.
A good teacher will try to explain the exceptions in a way so that they do not really seem to be exceptions and fit into the paradigm of the language. My greek teacher did just that. The third declension is often taught as one big set of exceptions, because the teacher found no real pattern in the declension and so he taught it with no central pattern. Dr. Letherman explained the basic way the third declension works and then taught us a set of rules regarding how the declension affects verbs. A balance must always be sought after. This balance aims to simplify the rules so they are usable, and yet deals with exceptions in a way so that they make sense too.