Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question this week comes from Kya Nwe. Hi Kiyah, I hope I said your name correctly.

Kya asked, hi Alicia, can we use the word the before many? I know the can't be used before some, many, his, her, etc., but I read a book

with this usage, The Many Significant Events of Lord Buddha. Can we use it like that or not?

Ah, really interesting question. So your question here is about the the at the beginning of this

book title in this case. So the title again

was the many significant events of Lord Buddha. So in the information that you gave before,

if we said like the many or the sum or the his or her or whatever, as you said, it would

sound really strange and not correct to just put that by itself.

We can't use it like that. However, when we put these words with other words, so in this case,

like many, comes before significant events. This many, as well as significant, functions as what is

called a modifier in English. So a modifier changes our understanding

of the noun that comes after it. So in this case, we actually have two modifiers. In this sentence,

we have many, which tells us a lot of something, and significant, the adjective significant,

which comes before events so both of these

words give us some more information about events right so we can understand these as modifiers so

in this sentence then the is not actually attached to many okay the is The is paired with a noun, right?

Like the dog, the cat, the food, right?

We put the before nouns to distinguish distinct nouns

from one another, right?

So what happens here and what happened

in this great example that you gave us

...