Introduction to articles

grammarians I would like to tell you a tale of two elephants in order to get it the idea of this thing called the article and we'll explain what that is after I tell you about the elephant and an elephant now articles are words like a or an or thee and articles are a kind of adjectives some people would call them a determiner that help you figure out how important something is or how specific something is so articles what articles do is they tell you whether or not something is specific you know are you thinking about any old elephant when you talk about an elephant or you talk thinking about one elephant in particular the elephant and this is the difference you know when we're talking about VL or thinking about a specific elephant we have a particular one in mind that this is what's called the definite because it defines what we're talking about you know this elephant could be the queen of the elephants and sometimes when we make sentences we want to aim for that kind of precision we want to be precise we want to know exactly what we're talking about and who we're talking about and why and that's a case where you use the word thee or the now if you're not being specific if you're talking about any old elephant an elephant that you're not especially familiar with an element an elephant you haven't introduced before that would be you would say an elephant because it's not specific and it's undefined so grammarians call that an indefinite article when you know who and what you are talking about for sure you say Z or them and when you're not sure you say a or an so if you knew that you were talking about a specific elephant say for example the queen of the elephants the queen as indicated by her royal crown you would say Z and if you were talking about any ole elephant you'd say and you'd use the indefinite article we'll cover this more later I just wanted to give you an introduction to the idea of what an article is so the four specific a or an for nonspecific you can learn anything David out