Re: Definiteness

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 8:49 PM, Paul Bennett <paul.w.bennett@...> wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:51:05 -0500, Mr Veoler <veoler@...> wrote:
>
>  > One thing I have had in mind to ask: What about definiteness?
>  >
>  > The definite article, and a generic demonstrative - what's the
>  > difference?
>
>  Semantically, very little, if any.
>
>  I suspect you could replace every demonstrative "that" and every "the" in
>  English both with "bleen" and be just as expressive and concise (once the
>  listener knew what "bleen" meant).
And it works for millions of native speakers of German, where the
demonstrative adjectives(?) and the articles are the same: "Ich suche
das Haus" = I'm looking for the house, while "Ich suche *das* Haus" =
I'm looking for that house.

And the relative pronouns are the same, too: "Ich suche das Haus, das
gelb ist" = I'm looking for the house which is yellow.

Or for a trifecta, consider "Ich suche das Haus, das so groß ist wie
*das* Haus" = I'm looking for bleen house, bleen is as big as *bleen*
house.

(Though now that I think about it, demonstrative uses typically add
another particle such as _hier_ "here" or _da_/_dort_ "there": "das
Haus hier, das Haus da" for "this house, that house". And there's also
"dieses Haus (hier), jenes Haus (da/dort)" for "this house, that
house".)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>