Re: articles
| From: | J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, January 30, 2005, 20:08 |
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On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:20:03 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 01:42:20PM -0500, Doug Dee wrote:
...
>> In large region of the Mddle East and Central Asia, definiteness is
>> generally marked only on direct objects. Definiteness marking is
>> almost absent in Australia and South America.
>
>I assume you mean the native languages thereof, since definity marking
>is alive and well in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. ;-)
>
>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. So how did the indefinite article develop? And what did it
>develop from?
In all western European languages I know of, from the numeral _one_! The
funny thing is that in Spanish, there's even a plural of it (unos, unas; it
means 'some of...')!
It seems to me that the indefinit article is kind of a default marking:
Nouns without articles (and other definitness markers such as possessive or
demonstrative adjectives) are unlikely to occur except in tight coalition
with a verb (to kick ass)...
No, forget about it: I'd say that the indefinite article marks nouns to be a
single instance of something countable (Lisa writes a message), whereas
nouns without article denote uncountable entities (Burns wants money, Homer
likes meat).
Multiple instances (obviously of countable entities) have just plural
marking (they have children) - except in French, where they have partitive
marking (the plural marking is only written) with the prefix (?) _des_ /de,
dez/ (the latter before vowels), which makes sense, since partitive means 'a
single instance/a few instances of a something'.
The definite article shows that you presuppose that the entity(s) you're
talking about are already known (I've written the message, I want the money).
Of course, all these differ slightly from language to language.
kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust
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