Re: articles

J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:

>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'.
It's not exactly a partitive marking

the partitive can only be singular: "de le" contracted in "du" (masculine),
"de la" (feminite), and "de l'" (before a vowel)

"Des" is an article of indefiniteness except when it is a contraction of "de
les"


Je vois des enfants = I see children ("des" is an undefinite article)
singular -> Je vois un enfant = I see a child

Je suis un ami des enfants = I am a friend of the children
singular -> Je suis un ami de l'enfant = I am a friend of the child


the partitive is only singular like

Je veux du(de le) boeuf = I want beef
Je veux de la viande = I want meet
Je veux de l'espadon = I want swordfish



So French, as Spanish has 4 articles before counting genders


Definite
- Sing: le, la (l')
- Plur: les

Indefinite
- Sing: un, une (un = 1)
- Plur: des


damien perrotin wrote:

>Well, many languages, including Indo-european languages (lavic excepted
>Bulgarian, Latin, Hittite, Gaullish....) don't have articles, but it is not
>restricted to IE. Hungarian has one (but this might be due to IE
>influence), but also all polynesian languages, wolof, Somali and Masai..
>There is also one in Swahili but one cannot exclude Arabic influence.
Yes I know that not ALL the IE languages has articles but all those who do
are IE or are situated near of Europe and of IE languages

And when I mean articles it can be only the definite one or some of the four
possibility as English don't has the plural indefinite article

Also, I don't speak it but I read that Swahili doesn't have articles and
that the definiteness of the nouns is not indicated


Doug Dee wrote:

>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.)
I've been unable to find a Lakhota (lakota?) grammar so I'll consider you're
right but if you have a good grammar to indicate to me I'd be happy to know
it

For the Semitic languages, their proximity of the IE languages allows to
think that could be a borrowing

Did Hebrew had articles?


About the PIE, the articles could had existed at that moment it's hard to
know...

But the fact that it didn't exist in PIE is also logic because Slavic
languages don't have articles

So the articles could have developped after the separation between the
Slavic and the Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Indo-Iranian groups

And it could be these Indo-Iranian languages that would have give articles
to Semitic languages


Is that plausible?

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