Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

Tristan wrote:
>Peter Bleackley wrote:
>>Are there any languages that mark a definite/indefinite distinction by
>>means other than articles? I've considered using inflections or word order
>>to mark it in various conlangs. I suppose there's the wa/ga distinction in
>>Japanese, but that's restricting a particular grammatical role (the topic)
>>to definite things, rather than marking definitiveness as such.
>
>I believe Swedish uses -en as a definite 'article', so 'boken' means
>'the book'. People from the land of IKEA may help you better (my sister
>has a job at a soon-to-open IKEA. Observations: IKEA is incredibly
>Swedish. Americans pronounce IKEA ick-aya (we say eye-kear, rhymes with
>'idea', and her explanation for the Swedish pronunciation is 'they just
>talk fast'). IKEA is incredibly Swedish. Victorian anti-smoking laws
>means that the Staff Smoking Lounge is actually a Staff Internet Lounge.
>IKEA is incredibly Swedish. (This particular?) IKEA promotes Staff (and
>customers) coming in via public transport. IKEA is incredibly Swedish).
I seem to detect some prejudice here, but yes, Swedish has got suffixed
definite articles. They fuse with the plural endings to: _hus_ "house",
_hus_ "houses", _huset_ "the house", _husen_ "the houses". Not to mention
looking different in different genders.

We've also got prepositional definite articles, which work much like
English's "the". You even get double definite articles when a definite noun
is preceed by a adjective; _det stora huset_ "the big house".

And IKEA is, of course, [i'ke:a].

                                                   Andreas

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