Is the use of the definite article in English peculiar compared to other European languages?

As John Lawler tells you, every language is “peculiar” in the sense that it has its own way of using (or not using) articles. In German, for instance, your “definite articles” double as what in traditional English grammar would be called relative pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative adjectives, and even personal pronouns. That strikes English speakers learning German as wholly eccentric and irrational—for Heaven's sake, even the French don’t do that!—until they get the hang of it.

One reason for the “peculiarity” in English use of the is that the carries a different burden of information than nominally “corresponding” terms in other European languages. In the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries English Britain was repeatedly invaded by Scandinavian peoples speaking a variety of Germanic and French dialects; the English language was creolized and almost entirely abandoned morphological distinctions of case and gender. Gender virtually dropped out of the language, and the syntactic contrasts formerly encoded in case morphology came to be expressed primarily by word order and prepositions. Consequently, when English finally settled on the as the canonical “definite article” it had no role to play in encoding case and gender, which are primary functions of the “definite articles” in many other European languages. That left the much freer to find new roles: most prominently, to encode by its presence or absence the “quality” of determination.