Re: articles

J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
 >
 > If I'm not wrong, the Dutch orthography distinguishes these two
 > meaning by an acute accent, which seems a splendid idea to me,
 > and I'm sometimes seduced to make the same use of the acute accent
 > in German (sie haben éin Auto).

The spelling "één" means "one", but "een" can mean both "one" and
"a(n)". But most of the time, the ambiguity is resolved by writing
accents.

It's more like a special case of the more general rule that any word can
be written with acute accents in order to indicate particular stress
on that word:

Dit is ónze auto.	This is _our_ car.



Ray Brown wrote:
 >
 > Carsten Becker wrote:
 >
 > I believe the Dutch _een_ is also [n=] when used as the indefinite
 > article and [e:n] when it means "one".

Hmm.. I'd say it sounds like [@n] to me; but the shwa is definitely
short. But where does one draw the line?

 > In Afrikaans the indefinite articles is a weakened form of _een_ (one)
 > and is written _'n_ (The |n| always lower case, even at the beginning
 > of a sentence) and is generally pronounced [@].

The general rule in Dutch is that if there is an incomplete word at the
beginning of a sentence, it is spelled with a lowercase letter and the
second word is capitalized:

'n Boek 		('n = een)	A book
's Ochtens vertrok ik.	('s = des)	In the morning, I left.
'k Heb hem gezien.	('k = ik)	I have seen him.
't Regent.		('t = het)	It rains.

 From what I've seen, It looks like Afrikaans uses the same spelling
convention.



René (back to keeping the torch burning..)