Re: articles

On Sunday, January 30, 2005, at 10:05 , # 1 wrote:
[snip]
>> According to _Definiteness_ by Christopher Lyons (Cambridge U. Press,
>> 1999),
>> only a minority of languages have articles, but it's "not a small
>> minority,"
>> and certainly not limited to IE.  Lakhota (North America) has articles,
>> and
>> other people on this list have mentioned Semitic.  (Others have also
>> pointed out
>> that articles were apparently not present in PIE, but have been
>> innovated in
>> some of its descendants.)
[snip]

> For the Semitic languages, their proximity of the IE languages allows to
> think that could be a borrowing
If so, then the borrowing was _from_ the Semitic languages, as it was
present in Semitic before it was present in any IE languages. It is
possible, I suppose, that it influenced proto-Greek and led to the
development of the article there - but I doubt it.

> Did Hebrew had articles?
It most certainly did - and still does.

Also ancient Egyptian also had a definite article.

[snip]
> But the fact that it didn't exist in PIE is also logic because Slavic
> languages don't have articles
Nor in Sanskrit or Latin or many other of the older IE languages. There
can be no doubt that PIE did _not_ have articles.

> So the articles could have developped after the separation between the
> Slavic and the Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian groups
They did - the evidence is quite clear.

> And it could be these Indo-Iranian languages that would have give articles
> to Semitic languages
>
>
> Is that plausible?
No, it is not. AFAIK the Indo-Iranian langs do not have articles and, in
any case, the use of the definite article in the Semitic languages is more
ancient.
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On Sunday, January 30, 2005, at 09:10 , Tim May wrote:

> Mark J. Reed wrote at 2005-01-30 14:20:03 (-0500)
>> On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 01:42:20PM -0500, Doug Dee wrote:
>>> According to _Definiteness_ by Christopher Lyons (Cambridge U. Press,
>>> 1999),
>>
>> Such a clunky word.  I think we should call it something else,
>> linguistic convention be damned.  Maybe "definity".
>> :)
>>
>
> I have a strong personal feeling that "definacy"* ought to be a
> possible formation with that sense,
Ach!!! How can an adjective terminating in -ite (from a Latin perfect
participle -i:tus) match up with a noun ending in -acy (<-- a:tium)?

Clunky definiteness may be, but it is a perfectly well-formed English
derivative from _definite_. *definacy is not well-formed from any point of
view.

>  but Google only finds 33 instances, most misspellings of "deficiency".
So i should think!     :)

*definity <-- *de:fi:ni:ta:s is well formed, as is the Latin word - tho it
is not found in Classical Latin (it might occur in post-Classical Latin,
for all I know).
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On Monday, January 31, 2005, at 06:07 , Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> From:    Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
>> "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> writes:
>>> Now, such marking makes logical sense to me; I can understand why it
>>> would be innovated.  But *in*definity marking, like English "a(n)", I
>>> don'
>>> t
>>> grok at all.  Virtually every use of the indefinite article can
>>> be replaced by either nothing or the number "one" without changing the
>>> meaning.
>
> In fact, there are a few languages which mark *only* indefiniteness.
> In many Mayan languages, for example.  These are rare, though.
> I don't know what their etymology is.
I seem to recall a month or so back someone observing that in languages
without articles, unmarked nouns tend to be definite and that, when
required, indefiniteness is expressed. I am no expert on Chinese, but what
Chines I have read seemed often to use yi1- (one) with little more meaning
than 'a/an'.  In Latin _qui:dam_ (fem. quaedam, neut. quoddam - an
adjective that was always placed after its noun) was not uncommonly used
just to indicate indefiniteness, e.g.
ciuis quidam Romanus = a Roman citizen.

It is also said in some text-books that _ille_ and _is_ sometimes =
"the" - but all the examples seem to be confined to the antecedent of a
relative clause. e.g.
uenit mihi in mentum diei illius, quo.... = I remembered the day on which.
.....
ea quae mihi tecum erat amicitia = The friendship which existed between
you and me.

>>> So how did the indefinite article develop?  And what did it
>>> develop from?
>>
>> Simply from 'one' I suppose.  In German, there's no difference.
>
> Indeed.
Yep - both _one_ and _a/an_ are derived from Old English /a:n/.

AFAIK in all the westen European languages that have an indefinite article,
  it is either an unstressed form of the word for "one" or is derived from
the word for "one".

Ray
===============================================
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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