Re: articles

Hey!

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On Sunday 30 January 2005 20:41, Henrik Theiling wrote:

 > Simply from 'one' I suppose.  In German, there's no
 > difference.
 >
 > **Henrik

The "Duden Herkunftswörterbuch" writes:

 | The Germanic counting word MHG, OHG _ein_, Goth. _ains_,
 | OE _ān_, Swedish _en_ goes back together with Lat.
 | _unus_, Greek _oínē_ ("one on the dice") and respective
 | words of other IE languages to IE _*oi-no-s_ "one", a
 | formation related to the pronominal stems _*e-_, _*i-_
 | (cf. _er_). The couting word became, similar to Lat.
 | _unus_, an undefinite article in the Romance languages
 | as well as in OHG (Engl. differs between the article
 | _a[n]_ and the counting word _one_). The word only
 | became an undefnite article in MHG (NHG _einer,
 | eine,eines; die einen - die andern_).

 ā = a-macron
 í = i-acute
 ē = e-macron

Note that in colloquial German, the stem _ein_ [Ai)n] is
mostly shortened to _'n_ [n=], which nearly sounds like
English _an_ (1). As the Duden already says, both words are
related.

The number related to _ein_ is _eins_; _eins_ is only used
for the number "1". The entity is always referred to as
"ein/-e/-es/-er/-em".

Carsten



(1) _'n_ appended to a verb can also mean "ihn" (him) in my
ideolect (_'ne_ in the regional dialect) or also "denn"
 ... but this is another story.

--
» http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri

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