For those out of the loop - Samuel Paty was a middle-school teacher in [redacted] who was murdered in the October 16 terror attack in [redacted].
More information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty
More information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty
If I say "pass me a glass" I don't care which glass you pass me, whereas if I say "the glass" it's implied context has a specificity so that there is a specific glass I'm requesting
"He was the victim" implies he was the only victim. "He was a victim" implies that there were other victims.
What's your first language? All of the european languages that I've studied have this feature.
Balto-Slavic comes from proto-indo-european and we have similar words (here in English / German / Polish)
'the' -> 'die' -> 'ten' (this) 'a/one' -> 'ein' -> 'jeden/jakiś' (one/one of many)
which come from the same PIE roots, but we don't use them as often. We generally understand from context whether we're talking about something specific or general.
And only use those helpers when we need clarification. There are also other ways to differentiate. For example speaking in singular (cat/kot) may mean 'a specific cat', but saying 'cats/koty' may mean 'a cat/cats'.
In other words, using 'the/a' is in majority of cases unnecessary from our point of view, because if we're talking about 'our cat' for an hour, we don't need to stress that it's 'the cat' that I meant when I said 'cat', or when we say 'Please feed cat' and we have a cat, it's way more likely that it's about our cat than some random cat on the street.
And this creates enormous problems for us when learning English or German (not sure about romance languages). We often ask ourselves, if we know whether we're talking about something specific or in general should we always use 'a/the -> ein/die'. And the answer is 'pretty much'. Unless you don't use it :)
'Love is a powerful emotion', and not 'A/The love is a powerful emotion', and even more elusive cases where those articles are not used.
It would be correct to have a conversation like:
> Let's go to the mall.
> Which one?
> I don't know. Do you have a preference?
Then we have places like "school", "work", "home" where we drop the "the". If we say "I'm going to the school" this implies that we're going for a different reason than normal where we'd say "I'm going to school".
Proper names don't usually have "the" in front of them but then we say "The Ukraine" and "The Philippines" and "The Yukon" as if we're distinguishing them from other Ukraines.
My wife is non-native English speaker so I encounter this a lot. I understand the confusion of this. Plus a lot of other languages don't think this way. When you grow up in a language where you don't care about specificity while you're talking, it becomes pretty difficult to start thinking about it later in life.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Theo_van_...
“The murderer Mohammed Bouyeri, an Islamic extremist, killed van Gogh. The reason for murdering Gogh was to oppose the controversial film which criticised Islam: “Submission”. Bouyeri shot and stabbed van Gogh, then cut his throat. Finally the killer attached a 5 letter page to van Gogh's chest with a knife.“
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4716909.stm
“Bouyeri had told the court he had acted out of religious conviction. Clutching a copy of the Koran, he said that "the law compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet"”
What was in the letter: it “threatened Somali-born Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She had written the script for Van Gogh's controversial film Submission, which criticised the treatment of women under Islam.”
(Completely unrelated to that event, the killed artist’s great-great uncle was Vincent van Gogh.)
"Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende called for calm and asked people to let investigators do their job before jumping to conclusions. "Nothing is known about the motive," he said in written statement."
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/03/world/europe/dutch-filmma...
And even more context, the transcript of a 2005 speech by George W. Bush, mentioning that event:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/administratio...
"In a courtroom in the Netherlands, the killer of Theo Van Gogh turned to the victim's grieving mother and said, "I do not feel your pain because I believe you are an infidel."
And in spite of this veneer of religious rhetoric, most of the victims claimed by the militants are fellow Muslims.
BUSH: When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple; the total rejection of justice and honor and moral and religion.
These militants are not just the enemies of America or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity.
(APPLAUSE)"
Frightening to see that from the Post.
>> From 2016 to 2018, Spain had the most court cases for terror offences (343) in the EU, followed by the UK (329), France (327) and Belgium (301). >> In 2018, 61% of verdicts for those cases in EU states were classed as "jihadist terror offences" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51560046
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_carto...