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

On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> 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.
I think the Italian system is more complicated.  As I recall:

M. sing. "il", but "lo" in front of consonant combinations and "z".
F. sing. "la", "l'" in front of vowels.
M. pl. "i", but "gli" in front of consonant combinations, "z" and vowels.
F. pl. "le", probably "gli" in some circumstances.

My recollection is obviously rather unreliable... it's been about 15
years since I tried to follow a Linguaphone course (as usual getting
bored and quitting after about 5 chapters.)

Greetings,
=D8rjan.