Samuel Johnson - A Grammar of the English Tongue

The English language has properly no dialects; the style of writers has no professed diversity in the use of words, or of their flexions and terminations, nor differs but by different degrees of skill or care. The oral diction is uniform in no spacious country, but has less variation in England than in most other nations of equal extent. The language of the northern counties retains many words now out of use, but which are commonly of the genuine Teutonick race, and is uttered with a pronunciation which now seems harsh and rough, but was probably used by our ancestors. The northern speech is therefore not barbarous, but obsolete. The speech in the western provinces seems to differ from the general diction rather by a depraved pronunciation, than by any real difference which letters would express.

Etymology teaches the deduction of one word from another, and the various modifications by which the sense of the same word is diversified; as horse , horses ; I love , I loved .

The English have two articles, an or a , and the .

A has an indefinite signification, and means one , with some reference to more; as This is a good book ; that is, one among the books that are good ; He was killed by a sword ; that is, some sword ; This is a better book for a man than a boy ; that is, for one of those that are men than one of those that are boys ; An army might enter without resistance ; that is, any army .

In the senses in which we use a or an in the singular, we speak in the plural without an article; as these are good books .

I have made an the original article, because it is only the Saxon an , or æn , one, applied to a new use, as the German ein

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