I just realized that English has a weird grammatical rule when it comes to how we refer to creeks and rivers.
In my city we have the Willamette River and Amazon Creek. Notice the difference? We don’t say “the Amazon Creek” any more than we say “Willamette River” without the article. To do either would mark someone instantly as a non-native speaker.
However, if the word “creek” is omitted due to having already been established, then the article is needed after all, as in the Amazon is the largest tributary of the Long Tom River.
You mean in languages other than English? No, I would not say it is true. For starters, most languages don’t use the concept of creek in a way that can be consistently translated into English as creek very much. Bach, in German, or riachuelo, in Spanish? Maybe a creek, maybe a river, or a small river. And the use of articles is sure different. Many Slav languages hardly ever use them (I read “Welcome to Czech Republic!” on the Czech - German border). German has three (der, die, das), Spanish two (el, ella), and they are used according to different rules than in English.
In German, some countries have articles: Die Türkey, die Schweiz, die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. Most have not: Frankreich, England, Peru. Same in Spain: El Perú, los Estados Unidos de América, el Japón, but others have not: Argentina, Alemania. Except if you say la República Argentina or la República Federal Alemana, then you get an article.
I’d be surprised if there was a rule that applied always, without exception, in all languages. And I’d be even more surprised if this hypothetical rule concerned articles for rivers and creeks.
Isn’t an arroyo a mostly dry creek that runs when there is significant rain? At least that’s how it is in South West of North America. Arroyo Burro runs right through my neighborhood and shortly there after ends at the ocean. That said, it’s often colloquially called Arroyo Burro Creek.
Oops: totally misread your post. In California English, an “arroyo” is usually dry, but will have water in tge rainy season. I think standard English is “gulch” but I’m not sure.
Being a native Californio, I had no idea that everyone did not use arroyo. Of course every one who watched old westerns knew about “dry gulching” someone.
We did get a chuckle when a NYer came out and said “what’s a burr-it-toe”? (that was years ago, I would guess what with Taco Bell and many other- but real- Mexican style restaurants, most everyone knows about tacos and burritos.
I understood that most such claimed cases are basically pension fraud, usually the centenarian is really a daughter or even granddaughter. How well attested are those 100,000 claimed cases?
No, that number is consistent with the number of people of all older ages in Japan. The average person in Japan lives to over 85. If you look at a chart of the ages of everyone in Japan, having over 100,000 people who are over 100 is consistent
So you made me look up creek. Synonyms: beck [British], bourn (or bourne), brook, brooklet, burn [British], gill [British], rill, rivulet, run [chiefly Midland], runlet, runnel, streamlet. The Spanish dictionary only gives torrente, riachuelo, regato, rivera, afluente as synonyms of arroyo. And then the Californians come and claim an arroyo is a Trockenbach, at least seasonally.
Of course your translation is correct, better than mine. But not the only one.
No need to be sorry! And I guess it will be inconsistent too. Probably even within the USA.
Now that you mention it, I learned only recently from another native speaker that this depends on gender, if we construe plural as a fourth gender. As they explained it, countries with masculine, feminine, or plural names need the definite article, and country names that are neuter take no article. Until I read that I had always thought it was random, and that die Schweiz was die Schweiz just because.
Generallly speaking ISTM that different languages have different rules about when you can or should use an article. For instance, in German you can use the definite article with personal names in a way that would be ungrammatical in English. In one of my earliest ever German lessons, one of the dialog lines was Wie geht’s dem Rolf?. If we included the article when translating this to English we’d have “How’s the Rolf doing?” which is nongrammatical.
Yet if you use an adjecteve before the name in English, you sometimes can use the definite article. You wouldn’t say “the Curley” but you could certainly say “the irrepressible Curley”.
Forget the article in front of “lake” or “creek,” I want to know who decides that we say “Lake Norman,” instead of “Norman Lake.” We have Kerr Lake, Jordan Lake, and Falls Lake in NC, but some lakes (e.g., Lake Norman) invert the order. They’re all man-made, so that doesn’t have anything to do with it.
(Let’s not bring the Great Lakes into this, as they are neither man-made nor located in NC.)
While watching a documentary last night, I was introduced to the term, “AGI”, Artificial General Intelligence. Unlike a lot of AIs that focus on one particular area, AGI is brilliant in all areas. Think of an Einstein or a Newton who is as brilliant in music, art, humanities, etc as he was in science and math. AGI is supposed to be the next be step in AI.
I’m surprised by that, because while in colloquial speech, we use an article before proper names all the time, in a strict sense it’s also ungrammatical in German. I’m sure all of my German teachers would have flagged this as an error.