[Article] A Glyph Is Not a Letter, a Token Is Not a Word, a Space Is Not a Space

[Koen G]

Well, for example in my Brabantian dialect, there is such a thing. But since the dialect is only spoken (and written informally, and on the decline), this cannot be tested statistically. Anyway, in my spoken dialect, there are three grammatical genders. The gender determines the ending of articles and adjectives (either null, "-e" or "en").

For example:

Masculine: den braven hond (the good dog)
Feminine: de brave kat (the good cat)

However, in the case of the masculine words, whether or not "n" is added also depends on the starting sound of the next word. You get -n before a, b, d, e, i, o, t, u. Also before "h", which is not pronounced so the vowel takes over. So all of the following words are masculine. The presence of "n" in the article only depends on "edge effects":

den aap
den boom
de citroen
den dief
den ezel
de fazant
de gieter
den hond
den iglo
de jacht
de kabouter
de leeuw
de man
de neushoorn
den ooievaar
de paling
de ruiter
de stengel
den tram
den uil
de vos
de wachter
de zager

The edge effects overrules everything, also when there are adjectives involved. To get back to the dog example, we say:

den braven hond
de groten hond

So the word simply looks at its neighbor's starting letter, regardless of the sequence.

Does this explain what we see in the VM? I presume everything in the VM is more extreme. But what it does show is that the principle is not anti-linguistic, even in European languages.