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mdp2021today at 6:35 AM2 repliesview on HN

You should not look at superficial similarities between languages, but at logic.

To the question: "What is he?", the answer can be "He is married, tall, doctor in medicine".

On another point of view, "He is a doctor" = "one in the set of the doctors". (But which one of the crowd there? The tall one is the doctor.)

"He is doctor in medicine": identity; "He is a doctor": aside property.

With different expressions, you are not expressing the same thing, but different ideas (some of them more preponderant in use in a territory).


Replies

vanderZwantoday at 7:20 AM

I'm not sure why, but sentence feels forced and unnatural, and as a result a bit unconvincing. My intuition is to insert an "and" at the end of those three options and then it feels like you can't drop the "a", i.e. "married, tall, and a doctor in medicine". I mean, maybe you can but the sentence feels odd to me.

And the weird part is that you can put those three properties in any order, and you would not place an "a" in front of the other two.

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parastitoday at 6:48 AM

Similarities between languages is a much more intuitive approach for non-English speakers. This comment just explains an English idiom in terms of English idioms.

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