Re: Probability of Article Replacement?
| From: | Joe <joe@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, February 26, 2003, 16:26 |
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On Wednesday 26 February 2003 9:36 am, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Staving Joe:
> >Essential? Articles serve no essential purpose in a language. They
> > clarify, but a distinction is not neccesary.
>
> 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.
>
> Pete Bleackley
Norwegian, IIRC, does it with suffixes(And Romanian, AFAIK). sverde?(sword) >
sverdet(the sword) is feminine, and sten > stenen(the stone) is masculine. I
know no norwegian, so I may have got the uninflected stem wrong, but I got
the inflected one right. Don't know about Swedish/Danish.
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