“In the days of his youth (though well past his childhood), a sharp-tongued colleague of mine once had a serious falling-out with his Japanese employer over “the” and “a.” He was working in Japan as a translator at the time, and his boss suggested that they were paying him too much because English was so full of these useless little definite and indefinite articles. Since he was being paid by the word, the employer suggested they ought to omit all the the’s and a’s from the word count.” Были на моей памяти заказчики, которые за пробелы не хотели платить, но вот эта история просто прекрасная (отрывок из книги Джея Рубина Making Sense of Japanese)