Apparently, Rob Gronkowski didn't major in Spanish in college. But better to call yourself "party" and not a pastry (even though it turns out that's a myth), right?
The interview in question, which I saw wonderfully described on Yahoo! Sports ("Rob Gronkowski, encapsulated in one sentence..."), got me to thinking about articles. Yes, really.
Some languages, like Chinese, don't use articles at all. Articles in English are fairly straightforward, since we don't assign genders to nouns and don't do too much in the way of different declensions (though this was not always the case).
Articles start to get trickier in languages like French, where nouns are dubbed either feminine or masculine and the article must follow suit. I wonder why (and will perhaps bother to find out in a future post) nouns ended up with their particular genders? For example, what makes the evening (le soir) masculine when the night (la nuit) is feminine?
Getting the article wrong in many cases will probably do no more than cause minor embarrassment, though in some cases it changes the word completely. Take the word livre. Le livre = the book; la livre = the pound (both the unit of weight and the British currency).
Things get even murkier in German, which throws in a third gender (neuter) for its nouns and where different declensions are alive and well. It's because of these complexities that in high school German we had a go-to noun in each gender that we used whenever necessary, regardless of whether it made sense in the broader scope of the discussion. This is why, 20+ years after my last German class, I can still say, "Wir habe eine Torte gebacken!". This of course means, "We have baked a cake."
But getting back to Gronk, all that really matters is that he's on the field in eight days. Good luck with that ankle, Gronk. Yo soy fiesta!
Words looked up this week:
