Yes, the latter. With the formal/familiar example that I used, I assume that both are grammatically correct although improper usage could be considered disrespectful. I also assume that native Spanish speakers don’t think about which to use whereas I, when learning Spanish and traveling to Mexico constantly worried that I might be using the wrong form.
I don’t think that the gender of individual names is broad enough nor enduring enough to be considered “part of the language”. “Ryan”, for instance, used to be a male name, and in fact was an extremely common name for boys born in the late 90s, but nowadays, it’s more often a female name. There are not only no overt rules for most names; there aren’t even any covert rules, just a big list of recognizably-male names and a big list of recognizably-female names, and every so often a name changes places, or is added to or falls off the list.
Yes, that seems to be the case. There are some frequently found characteristics in female names, like ending in a vowel (frequently “a”) – “Angela”, “Victoria”, “Olivia”, “Chloe”, “Ellie” – but a great many that fit no particular pattern, other than frequently evoking emotions, colours, or generally delicate things. And then there’s the “Frances” vs “Francis” debacle. And the unfortunate Evelyn Waugh must surely have spent some portion of his life correcting mistaken gender presumptions by those who had never met or heard of him.
An interesting example that I’m paraphrasing from McWhorter: You and a friend are talking about Steve, another friend you know very well; you and thecperson you’re talking to were there when Steve met his wife and you attended the wedding. You say “It’s funny how particular Steve gets about eastern European cuisine. He’s from Hawaii after all.” Your friend says, “Yeah, but he’s married to a Polish woman.”
If you were in class, the teacher would say “the” was for referring to particular items and “a” was generic ones - but Steve’s wife Maria is specific as it comes - you’ve known her for years and your friend was talking about her - but a native speaker would say “a” every time. There’s a lot of processing going on behind the selection of a versus the.
Agreed. I work with English text written by native speakers of Japanese and Lithuanian, and it’s clear that selecting between “a”, “the” and is one of the most difficult things to learn in English. The rules are much, much more complex than native speakers of English might imagine. But native speakers will get it right 100% of the time without ever having to think about it.
Can anyone explain why we go “to college”, but “to the university”? “Go home”, but “go to the store”?
Here is a rule that native speakers of English will catch on to immediately, but I not sure others will. Of course, one of the characteristic features is the of nouns to modify nouns. E.g., “water meter”, “the Joe Biden story” and so on. But there is an interesting phonetic rule involved that is mostly unconscious. Consider the following (true) sentence: "The brown building on the McGill campus is the Brown building. When an adjective modifies a noun, then unless there is a reason to contrast the adjective, the modifier is unstressed, but when a noun modifies a noun, the modifying noun is normally stressed.
When I saw this thread, I immediately looked up something I read a few years ago about the rules of adjective order.
But I see I’ve been ninja’d on the first post.
There are a lot of phonetic things that people aren’t generally aware of. For example there are two distinct “th” sounds. Say “this thing” and notice the difference. Also “the” is pronounced differently depending on the context. Stress is tricky too. We say PHOtograph, but phoTOgrapher, etc…
IMHO, this is another example of McWhorter going off the deep end and being utterly wrong. Which he is, frequently.
The reason that “a Polish woman” is appropriate – and completely unsurprising – is that, among all women in the world, his wife happens to be Polish. The phrase “the Polish woman” presupposes that there is some small coterie of women that this individual might have married, and among the various nationalities he was wooing, there was one specific Polish one among them.
It’s completely obvious to native English speakers , and maybe to speakers of other languages with definite and indefinite articles, because we subconsciously do the mental gymnastics required to choose “a” in that situation.
But a native speaker of Russian, for example, might well get it wrong.
That isn’t any sort of a universal rule of course, what is in english?
If there were two buildings side by side and I were point to at them and give directions, I’d say “that brown building is the Brown building”
There are some transatlantic differences here.
I would say “to college”, “to university” and “to hospital”. Well, I would say it that way if I was attending those places, as a student or patient, but in each case, I would add “the” if I was just going to visit the building.
If I wrote “my daughter went to the University”, you might ask why. Whereas, If I wrote “my daughter went to university”, you might ask what her subjects were.
There are, as we already discussed, no hard and fast rules for this stuff. It’s all part of a plot to make English hard for foreigners.
It seems to be working. 
Maybe a little too well considering some of the howlers we all hear from some of our native countrymen.
Replace “university” with “college” in that last paragraph and it would work here in the US. The difference is that Americans would always use the word “college” in situations where Brits would use the word “university” without an article (“going to college,” “being in college,” etc.).
Another example (not of transatlantic difference, but of “to” vs. “to the”): jail or prison. “Going to prison” and “going to the prison” have very different connotations.
Not just English. When Quebec first introduced mandatory French proficiency tests for civil servants many years ago, there were news stories of native French speakers failing the test.
However, the poor grammar and spelling ability of native English speakers is a common topic - we even have Grammar Nazis to set people straight.
I think part of the problem is that English speakers are lazy. (I know I am). What we call a “water meter”, for example turning a noun into an adjective, other languages might say “meter of water”. We recognize shorthand like “Gone fishing” for "I have gone fishing" (Or “he has…”; context is relevant). Although it can get confusing - the screen in my car shows the trunks with the legend “OPEN”. tap open and it opens, and shows “OPENED” along with the graphic. But “OPEN” to an English speaker can mean in short-speak “TO OPEN” or “IS OPEN”. In French, I presume, the verb and adjective have different endings (would it be “a ouvrer” vs. “ouvert”?)
A common failing of new speakers of any language is learning emphasis. As one English teacher stressed to us, you don’t put the ac-SENT on the wrong sy-LLA-ble. But you can hear English speakers making the same mistake, for example in pronouncing Spanish where the emphasis rule is explicit but different (second last syllable if it ends in vowel, N, or S, otherwise the last). The general rule in English is to emphasize the first syllable, but English is known for frequently breaking rules.
There’s also the difference between being “the shit,” “a shit,” and simply “shit.”
I recently worked with a man born and raised in Egypt, who came to the USA around age 20. Now about age 35. His enunciation was careful & precise, and his vocabulary was not obviously smaller than a native speaker’s might be.
But his cadence & syllable emphasis was … idiosyncratic. Made for an entertaining few days’ conversation.
I don’t think laziness has anything to do with that sort of thing. It’s just that English, being a Germanic language, works differently than French or Spanish.
This is not laziness. This is because English has different grammar than French. All languages have at least slightly different grammar than all other ones.
This is a better example than you realized: When you wrote “meter of water”, what you meant was “device that measures water usage”, but my first thought process said “a cubic meter of H2O”.
English’s hyper-tendency to delete words drives me (a sexagenarian native speaker) crazy sometimes. I understand the need for it in certain situations, such as when writing a headline for a news article, or designing a sign to post somewhere; these are cases where space is at a premium, so of course you want to shorten it. But sometimes it is so short as to be ambiguous or even meaningless, especially when there isn’t enough context to figure out whether a word is being used as a noun or a verb.