Of course, that doesn't say anything about the languages in general, there are also things where Spanish is less consistent. E.g. why do we say "la película es buena" but "el día está bueno"? I'm a native Spanish speaker and when asked by foreigners about a rule that would explain that, I've never been able to come up with one.

I'm learning Chinese and my feeling is that it's more consistent than both Spanish and English, things actually tend to make a lot of sense in Chinese. A pity that between the tones and the characters, it's much harder to learn than either of them.

Notably these are not the norm in English, but they do illustrate the pattern.

You can say "there are some vendors in the street" and it sounds normal. But if you were to say "they are some vendors" it sounds weird. It's pretty firmly more natural to say "they are vendors."

"(Lui) è un dottore", "(Io) sono un dottore".

"Un" is the indefinite article.

Subject is usually dropped, thus the brackets

they/them/an

Nah. English articles make sense, they're just usually unnecessary, and languages can often do without the information they add (or they reduce ambiguity in other ways.) English articles certainly reduce the context necessary to understand an isolated sentence.

In Spanish, for example, knowing the subject of the conversation or even knowing what's going on in the surroundings of the speaker might be necessary to understand a subjunctive. In English, hearing a definite article will tell you that you've missed something if you don't know what it refers to; hearing an indefinite one will assure you that you haven't. Hearing an article at all will assure you that the noun isn't being verbed (if it's not obvious.) It's impossible to tell what some Spanish sentences mean in isolation, because you don't know who would do, could do, should do, or was doing the thing. Means nothing in normal conversation. Koreans are like "how do you even know how old they were?" Quechua are like "how do you even know how they found out?"

There's a good reason for everything in language, because if we don't need it, it will just get dropped. The obvious purpose of a thing might not be the reason that it is necessary, though. It may plug an ambiguity hole left by other parts of the language. It may be necessary socially/religiously. It may just reduce to a tolerable level the amount of thinking one has to do before beginning to speak.

> It's great evidence that we can be very good at something with no communicable understanding of what it is we actually know.

Definitely true, but this is a bad example. English adjective order is the really good example that people usually cite. We don't even know that we're doing it. Also all of our weird grammatical tones, and our strong word/phrase -initial stress. Shifting that stuff changes meanings completely, everybody understands, nobody notices. Except people coming from tonal languages, trying their best not to sound like robots or broken tape recorders.

The "I don't know" noise, "[note]mmm[higher note]MMM[middle note]mmm," and the other weird sing songy grunts we do that are words. Our crazy vowels. The fact that the word "tests" is a voiced click and two hisses.

And that's not even getting into politeness - and the difference between modulating politeness and indexing politeness. English speakers modulate. Speakers of many Asian languages index. We change forms of address as a way to express how we currently feel about someone, whereas when a Korean person starts dropping honorifics, it almost means they don't even think you're human.

“This was a nice evening” is also difficult to characterize as not caring about which evening it is. As are books titled “An Introduction to XYZ”, where both the authors and the readers will probably care about the specific book.

For instance, "the bald eagle is native to North America".

There is also "The" in names; The Beatles, The Great Lakes, The Bahamas, The Bronx, ...

The role of "the" depends on context: how was the subject treated in previous sentences in the conversation.

"I see a bald eagle out of the window. The bald eagle is huge!"

In this second sentence, there is no way that "the bald eagle" could refer to the class of bald eagles, because the previous sentence introduces the topic of the sighting of a bald eagle. It refers to that one.

If "the bald eagle is huge" appears out of the blue, not preceded by any discussion of any eagle, that tends to bring in the class interpretation.

I learned the above through Japeanese. A similar thing happens with the は (wa) topic particle; I realized that "the" works in a similar way in that regard.

"I play the piano"

And then there are those cases where you actually use neither!

You can also say "Our town has the castle", which... now there it gets weird. I think it means it doesn't have much, but it has that. Well I guess it's specific in that it is one of the few (specific) things it has going for it.

Tic-tac-toe. Flip flop. Live, Laugh, Love. Zig Zag.

It's all I-A-O. Switch any of those around and it doesn't sound right.

Learning about the order of adjectives (big old red ball - try swapping any of those around) when I was dabbling in Klingon and the affix contests ( https://klingon.wiki/En/WordplayContest ) of noun suffixes having to be in a certain order ( https://klingon.wiki/En/NounSuffix and https://klingon.wiki/En/RelativeOrderingOfSuffixes ).

I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering

"I ate a single peas" "I ate many peas"

People thought it was a mistake and generated "pea" for a new singular.

Kex = biscuit, from "cakes"

Keps = hat, from "caps"