Degrees of volition in active languages (was Re:Chevraqis: asketch)

Mangiat wrote:

> Italian is one of the few languages I know to use articles even with nouns
> already determinated by possessives:
>
> 'il mio libro' - 'my book'
> 'la mia casa' - 'my house' (here there is an exception: you can say 'casa
> mia' as well)
There are dialects of Spanish that do this too.  In Guatamala and parts of
Mexico, one can say

   Tengo       una  mi  casa
   have:1Sg   a     my  house
   'I have a house'

This is partially because colonial dialects separate from their mother dialect
tend to conserve elements of their speech from earlier periods different from
those the mother dialect conserves, and 16th Century Spanish had this. Also,
local Mayan languages like Mam, which act as substrates on the Spanish of
the area, have this:

   juun   t-wiixh       saq
   one    3SgA-cat  white
   'a white cat of his'  (lit.  'a his- white -cat')

> BTW, I, too, think Greek 'So:krate:s' is ungrammatical. I have never found a
> Greek proper name without the article.
Not really.  I quote from Plato's 'Apology':

   'So:krate:s adikei kai periegrazetai zeto:n ta te hupo ge:s kai ourania....'
   'Socrates does wrong and makes a nuisance of himself by searching for
   those things under the earth and in the heavens....' (III.6)

Of course, it also depends on which period you're talking about.  In Homer's
time, there were no articles, and so consequently of course there were no NPs
with a required article.

> Well, I think Greek uses a lot
> articles. Indeed I've never studied all its declension patterns, you can
> work well even if you remember the declension of 'ho, he, tò'.
Well, for beginning Attic Greek, certainly.  For me this scheme
did not work for many periods of Greek.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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