Romance articles (WAS: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2))

Tom Wier <artabanos@...> wrote:
> Steg Belsky wrote:
>
> > This brings up another probably implausible concept i was thinking of
> > with Judean....the adoption of articles.  From what other people have
> > said, the modern Romance definite articles are descended from words
> > meaning something like "this"?
>
> Yeah, from "ille, illa, illud".  My Latin's pretty rusty, but I'm pretty sure
> that Spanish "esta" etc. descend from another Latin demonstrative,
> "iste".
Latin didn't have third person pronouns. Spanish _e'l, ella, ello_
("he, she, it") come from those Latin demonstratives, and I think
the articles _el, la, lo_ come from them too (they evolved differently
because the personal pronouns were stressed, while the articles were
not).

I don't know where the Spanish demonstratives came from. The
third level of deixis (_aquel, aquella, aquello_) obviously comes
from the series _ille, illa, illud_ but I don't know what /ak/ is
doing prefixed to them. But in the Quixote's Spanish they say _aqueste_,
not (only) _este_ "this", so /ak/ must mean something.

Oh! It's also in _aqui'_ and _aca'_ (both meaning "here"). And I've
heard _aculla'_ together with _alla'_ "there". Could it be that there
were not three but four deixis levels at some point in the Latin-Romance-
Spanish development?

Is there any Old Spanish/Romance expert in the list who could help?
This is an interesting subject (I'm doing the same thing, developing
articles, in my latest Drasele'q daughter lang) and I think it could
be interesting also for the thread about deixis (Fabian's question).


--Pablo Flores

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