Re: No pronoun, no article

On Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 08:04 , Doug Dee wrote:

> In a message dated 10/19/2003 2:58:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:
>
>
>> Yep - as very natlangs function very nicely without articles, there
>> must be a large number of conlang without them also.
>
>> . . .
>
>> I'm fairly certain Volapük didn't have them.  Certainly BrSc (whatever
>> form it eventually takes and name it is given) will not have them.
>
>
> According to Alan Libert in his book _Mixed Artificial Languages_, Volapuk
> had both a definite article ("et") and an indefinite article ("un").
I don't know where Alan Limbert got that info from.  Maybe it's the revised
Volapük of Arie de Jong; but it ain't Schleyer's Volapük.

I have checked today. It is stated quite categorically in Charles Sprague'
s "Handbook of
Volapük" (1887 - Sprague was a member of Academy of Volapük) "There are no
Articles in Volapük".
Indeed, Sprague even adds a footnote:
"Anyone may convince himself of possibility of dispensing with articles by
reading aloud any
extract.  Omission of articles will not be found not to obscure sense.  In
telegrams,
articles are seldom used."

'et' in fact a demostrative meaning "that".
The other demonstratives are:
at = 'this'
it = -self (e.g. man it 'the man himself')
ot - same
ut - that [as antecedant to a relative]

Where Limmbert gets 'un' from, I don't know.

The closest that Volapük got to an article was:
                        SINGULAR        PLURAL
NOMINATIVE     el         els
GENITIVE       ela        elas
DATIVE         ele        eles
ACCUSATIVE     eli        elis

This is used before unassimilated proper names and foreign borrowings
so that we know what number and case the noun is.  Words fully assimilated
will have the Volapük case and number suffixes.

Ray
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