Is there a grammatical reason for people saying “I pay my taxes” instead “I pay the taxes”?

  • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    19 hours ago

    Interestingly, in my language, it’s an uncountable noun, thus we say “pay the tax”, even though it contains all the subcategories of the various types of taxes.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      17 hours ago

      That’s an interesting linguistic point - so tax in your language would use “less/more” being uncountable.

      Technically, in English, taxes should be fewer/greater (being a countable dollar thing), but we often say “less”. Prescription vs description in action!

      • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        16 hours ago

        That’s right! We say “pay more/less tax” and “have you declared the tax?”, for instance. Although, I am not speaking from a standardized or school grammar perspective. This is just how I - as a native speaker - would use our equivalent of the word “tax”. This brings me back HARD. To times when I used to join various panel discussions to fiercly defend the/my stance on “correct language” - my vague stance being that the ruling classes need to let the actual spoken word and its usage to be reflected back into the academic discourse. End of off topic discussion.