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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Why do people write ‘baby’ or ‘newborn’ with no article like that? Surely it’s ‘a baby’ or ‘the baby’ or ‘your baby’ or maybe ‘babies’ if you mean in general. Just ‘baby’ sounds like broken English. You wouldn’t write ‘manager sent me an email’, you’d write ‘my manager’ or something like that with an article.

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I'm really glad to get feedback from English native. I'm even more happy because your feedback confirms my expectations: articles are really hard for me, because my first language does not have them.

I'm a Spanish native speaker and I also have problems with articles, but it seems like I have the opposite problem, it seems like Spanish uses articles more often than English, so I usually add them when they are not required, maybe not grammatically incorrect but sometimes I could sound kinda weird.

> sounds like broken English

There are many languages (notably Slavic ones) that don't have articles. My guess is that the comment author is a native speaker of one of those languages and not English.

Lots of native English speakers write ‘baby’ without an article.

As a native speaker of a Slavic language I can confirm that articles are something that I often seem to be getting wrong when I am writing (and speaking) English.

They seem like an unneeded extra, from the perspective of Slavic languages, where the information that they give is most often easily inferred from the context or the construction of the sentence.

Indian languages also lack articles - my mother immigrated to USA over 30 years ago and I still have to add in articles sometimes when I proofread something she writes.

To be fair, some English speakers will say baby to mean a particular unnamed infant. For example, a midwife or childcare adviser will talk about what to do "when baby gets home" or "If baby is hungry.." etc.

The whole comment is written with fewer articles than you'd expect for good English - my guess is that the commenter is not a native speaker, rather than trying to be cutesy.

Now that's the real difference between a native and a non-native speaker: As a non-native speaker, I'd probably put about the right amount of articles in there, but I can't even imagine why dropping them sounds 'cutesy'. Probably most of my sentences randomly project 'cutesy' or 'geeky' or 'obnoxious'. And it happens on a subconscious level even if you know that I'm not a native speaker.

Referring to "a baby" as "baby" is cutesy because it kind of treats "baby" as a name, or perhaps because it immitates the way young children talk. In normal circumstances dropping articles just makes you sound foreign.

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