Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 3 :)

"Raymond A. Brown" wrote:
> (I'm
> pretty sure there was a bit of Arabic influence in getting the Italian 'il'
> and Spanish 'el' instead of 'lo'
I'm not sure about that with Spanish.  Spanish has a rule that allows
the -o of some adjectives to be dropped when they precede the noun.
Thus, el buen gato, not *el bueno gato, but el gato es bueno, not *el
gato es buen.  So, anyhoo, it seems reasonable that the archaic elo
would've also been subject to that rule and dropped the -o, giving
el/ela/elos/elas.  Later, the initial e's would've been lost from all
but the masculine singular forms giving the modern el/la/los/las forms.
I think Italian does that too, but I'm not sure.

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