Re: articles

> It tought it could be only the IE languages but arabic has "el" and
> basque
> has the suffix "-a"
>
> Had "el" and "-a" been borrowed from an IE language?
>
Basque -a is a reduced form of the demonstrative stem ha(r)- (that one),
I believe (the absolutive form is "hura" though). The r often still
remains when a case ending beginning with a vowel is added, for example:

-arekin
-a(r)+ekin
art+"with"

So the Basque article -a isn't related to the IE articles, unless Basque
and PIE decend from a common ancestor (as some people have proposed, but
with no proof). As for the commoness of articles: many languages have
them, and many don't. The most common way a language acquires them is
from demonstratives, as in both Basque and many of the IE languages. For
example, all the Romance languages acquired articles from reduced forms
of Latin demonstratives.
 The interesting thing about Basque is that it also grammaticalized the
proximate article "hau" (this). Compare:

irakasleak         the teachers         originally: those teachers
irakasleok         we/all you teachers       originally: these teachers

sadly, the usage of the proximate article is restricted mostly now, but
it's still very interesting.
 I'd also say that -a is not really definite in meaning in Basque. It
functions more as a default: all NPs in Basque require some kind of
determiner, and when another isn't present -a tends to be added. It can
be interpreted as definite or indefinite in most circumstances... there
are only a few in which it can be only be definite in meaning.