Usage of articles

Question

1) I need to know( for my song ) how it would be right: "The red horizon." or just "Red horizon.". It should be the name of the song and also one sentence (without any others words) in the chorus.
I've found book called "The red horizon" and other song called "Red horizon".
HELP ME PLEASE.
2) Do I have to use articles every time before the noun even if there is adjective between them ? (excluding exceptions)
If i have: "The weather..."
It should be: "The cold weather" OR " Cold weather"
And also the same thing but not in a front of the sentence ( somewhere in the middle or in the end).

Sorry for my poor English.
Greetings from Ukraine.)

David Hatton · Accepted Answer

Hi - welcome to the forum and please sign up so that we know a bit more about you rather than you just being 'anonymous'!

Articles, when you don't use them in your own language, are a difficult thing to understand and explain. If in doubt, there should be an article when you are writing a proper sentence and including a countable subject or object.

THE dog is chasing A cat.

If we are referring to something in general and are not referring to a specific thing, we can use plurals without articles.

Dogs are chasing cats.

If we want to specify that these dogs or cats are known to us or are particular, specified creatures, we could use 'the' in front of either or both nouns.

THE dogs are chasing cats. (We know the dogs, we are referring to those particular dogs, but there are some cats which we do not know about and so they are just 'cats'.)

There are, however, many reasons to do differently in English and your example is one of them. If I can put in an external link, this is useful:
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/article.htm

'Red Horizon' makes sense as a concept. It is a thing, I understand it fully. If you are putting it into a sentence then you would need an article, but songs do not necessarily need proper English sentence structure.
Therefore as a title, it's great. As a general concept, there's no need to use the article at all. If you refer to 'The image of the red horizon...' or something else involving sentence structure, you really should use 'the'. But in song lyrics, rules are there to be broken so it depends how accurately you want to use the language against the specific impression you want to get across.

Something uncountable (like weather) doesn't have the same rules as you cannot have one weather or two weathers, etc. For this you can use it with 'the' if you want to be specific about weather you are having or that has been happening, or leave it off if you want to refer to weather in general.

'The cold weather today means I don't want to go out.'
or
'Cold weather is something I don't like.' (Now, the weather is a concept. It is not a specific example of weather that you or someone is experiencing.)

Hope this helps!

Usage of articles

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