I remember that my son, who grew up speaking Italian, used to see adverts for theme parks and say “A day, can we go there?” Why is this wrong?
The English language, like Danish, Hungarian and Albanian, but unlike most of the other main European languages, has an indefinite article (“a/an”) that is different from the word for the number 1 (“one”). So if you’re a native speaker of German, Norwegian, Swedish, or any of the Romance languages, you may have problems understanding the difference between
“There was a boy…” and “There was one boy…”
and may not really know why Martin Luther King said
“I have a dream.” and not “I have one dream”
Well, the first thing to mention is that when, as in sentences like these, we have a singular countable noun (boy, dream), we always need something before it: that necessary something is called a determiner. This doesn’t have to be a, an or one: it could be the definite article, or another determiner: this determiner or that determiner, (demonstrative) or your determiner could be possessive (“his dream, their dream..”). Which determiner should you use (interrogative)? Some determiner or other; any determiner! but whichever determiner you choose (relative), each and every singular countable noun (enumerating) has to have one.
(So, Russian-speakers please note: we can never say “I have dream”, and tell your Spanish- and Italian-speaking friends, we can never say “She is doctor.”)
Logic dictates that the only quantifying determiners we can use with singular nouns are “no” (“No man is an island” - John Donne) and “one”. We use “one” to indicate a particular example from a group, set or sequence:
“In the class I taught, there was one boy who…”;
“I have a lot of really weird recurring dreams: I have one dream where…”
“One” has a quality that “a” lacks: it can be emphasized. The article “a” is the weakest word in the English language: it is never naturally stressed in a phrase or a sentence, so when we want to add more emphasis to the sentence “There’s a thing I need to know”, to make it clear that this particular piece of information is important, we immediately replace the article:
“There’s one thing I need to know.”
To return to my son, “a day” could never work as an adverbial time expression, (like “tomorrow” or “last year”) because the stress needs to be shared between the noun and the determiner to give it the appropriate emphasis: “A” cannot be emphatic, and cannot evoke that indeterminate, but imagined and wished-for, day: it has to be
“One day, …”
“One” may not do active service as an indefinite article in English, but it certainly keeps itself busy as a sort of noun. It can even, paradoxically, pluralize to “ones”. Firstly, “one(s)” can be a kind of definite pronoun, when preceded by a determiner. This is how it works:
“The Ornithogalum adseptentrionesvergentulum” is something we probably wouldn’t want to say twice, so the second time, when we’re specifying which Ornithogalum adseptentrionesvergentulum we mean, we say “the one…” Also, although Which..?, this, that, these and those can happily act as pronouns, in spoken English we often prefer to use them as determiners, supporting the pronoun “one(s)”:
- I’d like to buy one of your Ornithogalum adseptentrionesvergentulums please.
- Certainly. Which one would you like?
- The one on the left please.
- Not the bigger one?
- Well that one’s a bit too big for my window box; could I have this one please?
- I’m afraid that one’s already been sold, but we’ve got another one in the back room…
“The one” or “the big one” are sometimes used without explicit reference to a noun, to indicate something momentous, something we’ve been waiting or looking for. When your friend tells you about a man she’s met, and you want to know whether she would like him to be not just her 24th boyfriend, but her husband/ life-partner, you might say “Do you think he's the one?” She'll know what you mean.
With possessive determiners we avoid “one”, and use a possessive pronoun instead: schoolchildren who say “Look at our bikes – his one is bigger than my one and her one ” will always be corrected, and instructed to say
“his is bigger than mine and hers.”
As an object pronoun, “one(s)”, with no determiner, can also replace a noun accompanied by an indefinite article, or an indefinite plural noun. The second part of this sentence - “I need a memory stick; have you got a memory stick?” – becomes “have you got one?” The conversation might carry on like this:
- We’ve only got 1GB ones.
- Have you got any blue ones?
- I think there might be one in the stock-room.
- Can you get me one please?
- Here you are. It’s the last one!
- No it’s not – I can see another one over there, behind the Ornithogalum adseptentrionesvergen- tulums. (..and so on)
PLEASE NOTE: This use of “one” and “ones” is fine in conversation and informal writing, but in formal contexts we try to avoid it. Instead of “Churchill preferred French tanks to English ones,” a good writer would always turn the sentence around to, for example, “Churchill preferred French tanks to their English equivalents.”
Our final use of the pronoun “one”, on the other hand, is generally very formal. According to this use, “one” can be a pronoun representing “a person” or “anyone”. When one wants to write about the things that people in general do, think, say, or like, one can generalize by using this “impersonal” pronoun. One may find this useful in formal writing. However, if one does this in conversation one might find that people look at one in a curious way, as informally one usually uses “you” to generalize (“How do you pronounce this word?”)
The problem is that various members of the English Royal Family acquired the habit of de-personalizing and formalizing the things they said using this formula – “One likes to take a short walk after lunch” - and now, even though “How does one pronounce this word?” is perfectly correct, if one talks like this a lot, one risks sounding like Prince Charles.
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