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Europeans, what is something that Americans have/do that makes no sense to you? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh I can kind of answer this.

Take "your keys" vs "the keys". In both cases you have a determiner and a noun. Now because European languages are not topic prominent they mostly attach some kind of a determiner to nouns. Now most language in Romance and Germanic family over several century pick "the noun of noun" while English went with more "adj noun". This results in English using articles less then other languages.

Neither of these is more logical then the other. IT just each language need some way to specify the scale of nouns. I am talking about all keys everywhere, no I am talking arrow keys. In a lot of langues I wouldn't even use the word "the" when talking about them because many languages just don't have a word for the.