In "They are doctors" the 'they' is the subject and you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.

But in "The doctors are female" you do because the subject is some specific group of doctors. It's singular because its a single group of things.

> you don't need articles. 'They' is plural.

But why not? Plural indefinite article exists in some languages, why not in English?

In programming terms 'a' is followed by a type name and 'the' is followed by a variable name.

I have the opposite problem. I speak a non-English language (poorly) that hasn't got 'a' or 'the' so I end up shoehorning other words into the sentence to take their place, such as 'one [particular item]' for 'the' and 'some [item]' for 'a'. I likely sound like an idiot when I talk. Non native speakers of English have similar ticks.

But (in)definite articles aren't difficult, you're either talking about some member of a group or class of items without specifying which one (a), or you're talking about one particular example or instance that is being referenced in context (the).

I don't understand how languages can talk about things precisely without them. I guess they just use context, more or other words in their place, or structure sentences differently. English just feels convenient in this case, but obviously I am biased.

Even languages that have both indefinite and definite articles use them slightly differently, for example Spanish, German, English and Hungarian have them, but the rules of their use is somewhat different, though the main idea is similar.

It takes time to learn things like "at school" vs "at the school", "to school", "to the school", "I know English", not "I know the English", but "I know the English language" etc. etc. It's obviously easy when you speak it natively, but it just happens to be a certain way and could plausible be in another way too, as other languages show.

The funny thing is is that all the examples you gave are correct English.

[I learned it] "at school" - I learned it at school, I'm not specifying which school

[I learned it] "at the school" - I learned it at school, the one that was referenced

"I know the English" - I know the English people

"I know the English language" - I know the English language (specifically)

The point being that articles do a lot of work. They're not just decoration whereby there is some arbitrary correct form or rule. It's a matter of what you want to say.

But in the third and forth sentences 'English' is both a collective noun and the name of a language which is just a coincidence.

German speakers probably don't understand how English can affect sentence emphasis with strict SVO word order. In German the topic of the sentence comes first and the declension tells you if its S or O.

> And that 50% who voted No was more people than even voted in the EU elections (to elect MEPs) before that.

This is ignorance or just plain bad faith. MEPs are not the main democratic mechanism of the EU, it's the national governments. This is on purpose, so that both national democracy and sovereignty can be maintained.

This is the typical of EU misinformation spouted by people who have a problem with the EU. Of course people can dislike the EU all they want, but people who constantly rail against it, with little or no basis in fact, I'll never know. It's not about the EU, it's some sort of bitter obsession or ideological idiocy. Somehow the EU means much more to them than they claim, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much energy complaining about it.

But I was a supporter of the EU who noticed this. Like I comment elsewhere, the EU is like Teflon and resistant to critique - when there is an issue or a defect we get comments like yours “yes yes but this isn’t the actual process, that is a governmental/national/commission/parliament issue.”

It’s not misinformation - it’s a very basic fact about the democratic mechanism we had for electing who represents us in the EU parliament which makes and votes on our laws. The opacity of this process and the general lack of enfranchisement in it is a major flaw but one that the EU was content with, because a simulation of a democratic process is good enough, better even, because it avoids the scrutiny and can be defended by people like you. It’s a basic fact that people did get off their arses and vote to leave in greater numbers than even bothered to be enfranchised in the elections for MEPs. You don’t have to bleat about it or invoke ignorance or bad faith because all you show up is your own bad faith to a fairly basic fact.

And it remains that people had never been given the chance to vote on whether they wanted to be governed by the EUs mechanisms. It got decided for people by politicians that it was in their interests that a trading block rapidly evolve into a super-national government. It was decided by those politicians how it operates and politicians the ones with the control over its integration, and what kicked off my comments in this thread, that it has a president who speaks for the whole of Europe who only they choose. When put to the actual people for the first and only time, they decided they weren’t into it for myriad of individual reasons that can’t be usefully modelled. And now as we’ve seen endless times in these threads, the response from Europe hasn’t been to go back to the drawing board, there is a general tone of traitorship and casting it as entirely British issue caused basically by racists and idiots, when it happened within the EU and was also an EU issue. Nowhere else in the EU would 17 million people making a very clear decision be called a gang of fuckn idiots.

> Exactly. And, let's face it, democracy. Either the people in the UK wanted freedom of movement or they didn't, and they voted on that basis.

It was neither. They wanted freedom of movement that was only one way. In fact they didn't know what they wanted because they were sold a bill of goods when it came to Brexit.

The referendum was entirely the UK's choice and had nothing to do with the EU. It offered more concessions than the UK deserved (having already held numerous opt-outs) and they still called the vote.

One of the effects of Brexit is that EU popular solidarity has noticeably improved while the UK has gone in the opposite direction. That says a lot about Brexit.

> But at the same time I thought that if there's one way to get into conflict with the current US administration - who declared EU their only adversary in the US National Security Plan - this is it.

That would be the icing on the cake.

I think there is a lot of value there for other advanced economies in Asia, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Aus/NZ.

With the US self-destructing these countries need a new plan. They are routinely being pushed around by China and need a counterweight.

Who knows, maybe after all the doom and gloom the EU might just win by default because the other world powers have become so unattractive the rest of the world rallies around them?

When everyone goes crazy, a boring place that respect the law and fair exchanges feels much more welcoming.

Do you have anything at all to contribute besides mindless EU hate?

The mentally enfeebled only seem to be able to parrot hateful things they don't understand that they read on some social media cesspit.

Between the US and China, the EU is the future, but they need to federalize then leverage that to implement a top notch military and economy.

Carney can see this and wants a piece of the action. The question is if the EU can escape its parochial myopia and see it.

Hopefully Russia will do something even stupider and precipitate the existential crisis that the EU desperately needs to get off its ass.

> but they need to federalize

That's not happening or if it did they'd lose a third of the members doing it.

> If it did they'd lose a third of the members doing it.

As a federalist, that would be fine for me. Make a two speed europe. EU stays primarily a trade block that the "federal EU" is in.

Go ahead, make my day.

I would even suspect Carney would want to eventually be the head of the EU (he also has European citizenship)

> they need to federalize

"Shit Americans say"

The EU is NOTHING like the US. The difference between each member is the same as the difference between the US and Mexico, not like the difference between California and Utah.

It's utter ignorance to suggest that the EU could one day become a single country.

You've obviously not a (patriotic) European. You also don't understand that Europeans are more similar to each other than they are to the rest of the world. Ask one how many views they share with Americans, Asians or Africans.

I am European first and foremost, I have an ethnic nationality which is secondary and almost irrelevant. In my mind Euorpe is actual a large collection of regions, which hold more meaning for inhabitants than nation states. But we all love our European brethren no matter who they are.

This is complete nonsense and absolutely no European considers themself European first and their own country's nationality second. You're neither European, nor American, nor Asian or African or anything else, you're clearly a bot.

Somebody with the username "nutjob2" probably chose the username because he has opinions outside the Overton window.

But in my experience there definitely are Europeans with that view. WW2 left some deep impressions about the dangers of nationalism, especially in Germany. That led some to consider themselves Europeans first.

“A single country” is pretty vague. For some definitions the EU already is one, for other definitions the EU can never be one.

What we do need is doing more things on the EU level. E.g. there’s no point in all member states building a nuclear umbrella or a space program. Some taxes also work better on an EU level because capital flows freely in the union and makes taxation hard for individual members.

Nevertheless that exact plan is in the minds of every higher-up running the EU. Individual counties are an anachronism that will eventually be got rid of if the EU is to continue.

The UK is a "country of countries" - with fairly significant differences between some of the component parts - maybe the EU could become something like that?

You realise how many wars and how much bloodshed over how many centuries it took for that to happen in the UK?

Repeating that part would be unnecessarily detrimental, especially given that right now "become a country" would require majority support from everyone to even get started.

Also, the general area was basically at war most of the time from the Etruscan era to the formation of the EU, and the EU is (amongst other things) an attempt to be at peace, so it would already be a similarity even without repetition.

The political union of England and Scotland was achieved without bloodshed and largely because folks in Scotland wanted a financial bailout to cover the utterly disastrous Scottish colonial efforts in Darien.

How about Northern Ireland?

Personally I expect NI to peacefully unify with the Republic of Ireland at some point in the next 20 years? Or maybe not - all depends on how people vote rather than fighting?

I feel like you might not know much about the peace process in NI. If you’d like to see a return to things getting blown up and catholics being gunned down by loyalists, then suggest conducting a vote on joining Ireland and leaving the UK.

It also reflects how Europeans increasingly feel about the EU, especially young people who don't see or live within national borders and very much enjoy those freedoms. They are the future and what the EU will eventually become.

English is indeed the de facto common language of the EU, spoken by almost all young people. It's a great thing, English is the global language. Don't know why you think it would be a mess, but your comments seem to be fairly negative towards the EU.