Re: articles

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> Henrik Theiling wrote on the etymology of the indefinite article 'a':
>
> >Simply from 'one' I suppose.  In German, there's no difference.
>
> In written German, that is. In spoken German, however, the meaning 'one' (as
> in the translation of 'they have one car': sie haben ein Auto) is
> distinguished by stress from the meaning 'a' (as in the translation of 'they
> have a car': sie haben ein Auto).
>
> (Of course, there's many different ways of distinguishing them in colloquial
> German or in regional dialects of German, as Carsten Becker's pointed out.)
>
> 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).
I'm told Wittgenstein did this consistently in his philosophical writings.

                                                          Andreas