Indefinite article and Proper article

Indefinite article

An indefinite article indicates that its noun is not a particular one identifiable to the listener. It may be something that the speaker is mentioning for the first time, or the speaker may be making a general statement about any such thing. a/an are the indefinite articles used in English. The form an is used before words that begin with a vowel sound (even if spelled with an initial consonant, as in an hour), and a before words that begin with a consonant sound (even if spelled with a vowel, as in a European).

She had a house so large that an elephant would get lost without a map.

Before some words beginning with a pronounced (not silent) h in an unstressed first syllable, such as historic(al), hallucination, hilarious, horrendous, and horrific, some (especially older) British writers prefer to use an over a (an historical event, etc.).^[7] An is also preferred before hotel by some writers of British English (probably reflecting the relatively recent adoption of the word from French, in which the h is not pronounced).^[8] The use of "an" before words beginning with an unstressed "h" is more common generally in British English than in American.^[8] American writers normally use a in all these cases, although there are occasional uses of an historic(al) in American English.^[9] According to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, such use is increasingly rare in British English too.^[7] Unlike British English, American English typically uses an before herb, since the h in this word is silent for most Americans. The correct usage in respect of the term "hereditary peer" was the subject of an amendment debated in the UK Parliament.^[10]

The word some can be viewed as functionally a plural of a/an in that, for example, "an apple" never means more than one apple but "give me some apples" indicates more than one is desired but without specifying a quantity. In this view it is functionally homologous to the Spanish plural indefinite article unos/unas; un/una ("one") is completely indistinguishable from the unit number, except where it has a plural form (unos/unas). Thus Dame una manzana" ("Give me an apple") but "Dame unas manzanas" ("Give me some apples"). The indefiniteness of some or unos can sometimes be semiquantitatively narrowed, as in "There are some apples there, but not many."

Some also serves as a singular indefinite article, as in "There is some person on the porch".

Proper article

A proper article indicates that its noun is proper, and refers to a unique entity. It may be the name of a person, the name of a place, the name of a planet, etc. The Maori language has the proper article a, which is used for personal nouns; so, "a Pita" means "Peter". In Maori, when the personal nouns have the definite or indefinite article as an important part of it, both articles are present; for example, the phrase "a Te Rauparaha", which contains both the proper article a and the definite article Te refers to the person name Te Rauparaha.

The definite article is sometimes also used with proper names, which are already specified by definition (there is just one of them). For example: the Amazon, the Hebrides. In these cases, the definite article may be considered superfluous. Its presence can be accounted for by the assumption that they are shorthand for a longer phrase in which the name is a specifier, i.e. the Amazon River, the Hebridean Islands.^{[citation needed]} Where the nouns in such longer phrases cannot be omitted, the definite article is universally kept: the United States, the People's Republic of China. This distinction can sometimes become a political matter: the former usage the Ukraine stressed the word's Russian meaning of "borderlands"; as Ukraine became a fully independent state following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it requested that formal mentions of its name omit the article. Similar shifts in usage have occurred in the names of Sudan and both Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa); a move in the other direction occurred with The Gambia. In certain languages, such as French and Italian, definite articles are used with all or most names of countries: la France/le Canada/l'Allemagne, l'Italia/la Spagna/il Brasile.