3 ms·
Articles obviously add information: is it a specific, known house you are going to (I'm going to the house) or a non-specific/not previously referred to (I'm go
by morsch 3y ago
Articles obviously add information: is it a specific, known house you are going to (I'm going to the house) or a non-specific/not previously referred to (I'm going to a house)?
When it's your own house you're going to, you could argue the definite article wouldn't add anything, and the phrasal verb to go home drops it (ie. I'm going home), though adding an article is possible and changes the meaning (I'm going to the/a home, in the context of a home for the elderly or some such).
- denton-scratch 3y ago> is it a specific, known house you are going to "I'm going house" contains less meaning than "I'm going to [a] house". Without the preposition, it could mean "I'm leaving [a] house" ("I'm going from house").
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 3y agoI would leave the argument but tweak the example given to support: it "adds nothing to the language" that we have many more or less perfectly synonymous terms, such as purse/handbag, pop/soda, and so on.
- regularfry 3y agoThey're regional though. "Purse" and "handbag" don't have the same meaning in the UK, and "pop" and "soda" are rare in their US meaning. In this case "compose" and "comprise" do have different meanings. "Compose" has the sense of "put together" whereas "comprise" is closer to "contain". You'd never say "contained of" unless you were going for a really archaic sentence construction. I think it's less clear that "comprised of" is incorrect in all cases, but I do agree it sounds ugly and that there's almost always going to be a better phrasing available.
- emodendroket 3y agoWikipedia themselves maintain a page about "comprised of" that has citations going back to the 18th Century. I think it has been long enough to concede that it has the supposedly objectionable meaning.
- 112233 3y agoThis statement is true only if it is not possible to tell from the context if the noun refers to a specific/previously mentioned thing or not. It would be possible to measure the amount of information contained in these articles, Shannon style, by taking a body of text, removing the articles, and then asking a bunch of english speakers ( that can possibly be approximated by a LLM ) to put back in the correct articles. Any uncertainty or variation would point to information being lost by the removal.
- tysam_and 3y agoI was thinking about Shannon entropy as well, as the OP completely forgets the word 'from' as well! "I go to house", "I go from house". Certainly, house contains more information, but the concepts of to and from as some kind of token do contain meaningful amounts of entropy as well.
- morsch 3y agoHuman languages are highly redundant, for the most part. The communication channel is lossy, so you add parity bits and error correction codes.