llections - MyHeritage www.myheritage.com/research?action...1...Hjhb...? Text: "... a powerful 4HJHB' t J 1M-TABD 1 I T.

DAILY 11 TREMPEALEAU VALLEY Alma Center Top Loop Foes VALLEY C Til IHt 1 1 1ESVLTS Almi BUIr M. It. Si ... 1 2 3 Note that although the Saami languages spoken in northern parts of Norway and Sw eden lack articles, Norwegian and Swedish are the majority languages in this are a. Note also that although the Irish and Scottish Gaelic languages lack indefini te articles they too are minority languages in this area, with English being the main spoken language. Articles are found in many Indo-European and Semitic languages but are absent fr om some large languages of the world, such as Indonesian, Japanese, Hindi and Ru ssian. Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto-Indo -European, did not have articles. Most of the languages in this family do not ha ve definite or indefinite articles; there is no article in Latin, Sanskrit, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the families of Slavic languages (not including Bulgarian, Macedonian and Torlak, which are rather distinctive a mong the Slavic languages in terms of grammar) and Baltic languages. Although Cl assical Greek has a definite article (which has survived into Modern Greek and w hich bears strong resemblance to the German definite article), the earlier Homer ic Greek did not. Articles developed independently in several language families. Not all languages have both definite and indefinite articles, and some languages have different types of definite and indefinite articles to distinguish finer s hades of meaning; for example, French and Italian have a partitive article used for indefinite mass nouns, while Colognian has two distinct sets of definite art icles indicating focus and uniqueness, and Macedonian uses definite articles in a demonstrative sense, with a tripartite distinction (proximal, medial, distal) based on distance from the speaker or interlocutor. The words this and that (and their plurals, these and those) can be understood in English as, ultimately, fo rms of the definite article the (whose declension in Old English included thaes, an ancestral form of this/that and these/those). In many languages, the form of the article may vary according to the gender, num ber, or case of its noun. In some languages the article may be the only indicati on of the case. Many languages do not use articles at all, and may use other way s of indicating old versus new information, such as topic comment constructions. Articles used in some of the world's languages Language definite article indefinite article partitive articl e Arabic al- or el ?? (prefix) Kurdish -eke -ekan -k -ank hend, birr Hebrew ha- ? (prefix) Greek ?, ?, t? ??, ??, ta ??a?, ?a, ??a English the a, an some German der, die, das des, dem, den ein, eine, einer, eines einem, einen Dutch de, het ('t) een ('n) Tamazight __ yan, yat ittsn, ittsnt Spanish el, la, lo los, las un, una unos, unas algo, algn, algunos, algunas, alguien Portuguese o, a

os, as um, uma uns, umas French le, la, l' les un, une des du, de la, de l' des Italian il, lo, la, l' i, gli, le un', uno, una, un del, dello, della, dell' dei, degli, degl' , delle Hungarian a, az egy In the above examples, the article always precedes its noun (with the exception of the Arabic tanween and the Hebrew ? ha-). In some languages, however, the def inite article is not always a separate word, but may be suffixed, attached to th e end of its noun as a suffix. For example, Albanian: plis, a white fez; plisi, the white fez Aramaic: ???, peace; ????, the peace Note: Aramaic is written from right to left, so an Aleph is added to the end of the word. Bengali: "Boi", book; "Boiti/Boita/Boikhana" : "The Book" Romanian: drum, road; drumul, the road (the article is just "l", "u" is a "conne ction vowel" Romanian: vocala de legatura) Icelandic: hestur, horse; hesturinn, the horse Persian: sib, apple; sibe, the apple Danish and Norwegian: stol, chair; stolen, the chair Swedish: hus, house; huset, the house; if there is an adjective: det gamla huset , the old house Bulgarian: ???? stol, chair; ?????? stolat, the chair (subject); ????? stola, th e chair (object) Macedonian: ???? stol, chair; ?????? stolot, the chair; ?????? stolov, this chai r; ?????? stolon, that chair Example of prefixed definite article: Hebrew: ????, transcribed as yeled, a boy; ????, transcribed as ha-yeled, the bo y A different way, limited to the definitive article, is used by Latvian. The noun doesn't change but the adjective can be defined or undefined: galds, a table / the table; balts galds, a white table; baltais galds, the white table. Evolution[edit] Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe. Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of c ertain adjectives. Joseph Greenberg in Universals of Human Language[9] describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and i n turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually article s may evolve anew from demonstratives. Definite articles[edit] Definite articles typically arise from demonstratives meaning that. For example, the definite articles in the Romance languages e.g., el, il, le, la derive from the Latin demonstratives ille (masculine) and illa (feminine). The English definite article the, written e in Middle English, derives from an Ol d English demonstrative, which, according to gender, was written se (masculine), seo (feminine) (e and eo in the Northumbrian dialect), or t (neuter). The neuter fo rm t also gave rise to the modern demonstrative that. The ye occasionally seen in pseudo-archaic usage such as "Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe" is actually a form of e, where the letter thorn () came to be written as a y. Multiple demonstratives can give rise to multiple definite articles. Macedonian, for example, in which the articles are suffixed, has ?????? (stolot), the chair ; ?????? (stolov), this chair; and ?????? (stolon), that chair. These derive fro

m the Common Slavic demonstratives *t? "this, that", *ov? "this here" and *on? " that over there, yonder" respectively. Colognian prepositions articles such as i n dat Auto, or et Auto, the car; the first being specifically selected, focussed , newly introduced, while the latter is not selected, unfocussed, already known, general, or generic. Standard Basque distinguishes between proximal and distal definite articles in the plural (dialectally, a proximal singular and an additio nal medial grade may also be present). The Basque distal form (with infix -a-, e tymologically a suffixed and phonetically reduced form of the distal demonstrati ve har-/hai-) functions as the default definite article, whereas the proximal fo rm (with infix -o-, derived from the proximal demonstrative hau-/hon-) is marked and indicates some kind of (spatial or otherwise) close relationship between th e speaker and the referent (e.g., it may imply that the speaker is included in t he referent): etxeak ("the houses") vs. etxeok ("these houses [of ours]"), euska ldunak ("the Basque speakers") vs. euskaldunok ("we, the Basque speakers"). Indefinite articles[edit] Indefinite articles typically arise from adjectives meaning one. For example, th e indefinite articles in the Romance languages e.g., un, una, une derive from the La tin adjective unus. Partitive articles, however, derive from Vulgar Latin de ill o, meaning (some) of the. The English indefinite article an is derived from the same root as one. The -n c ame to be dropped before consonants, giving rise to the shortened form a. The ex istence of both forms has led to many cases of juncture loss, e.g., transforming the original a napron into the modern an apron. The Persian indefinite article is yek meaning one. See also[edit] English articles Al- (definite article in Arabic) Definiteness Definite description References[edit]

Jump up ^ World English. "The 500 Most Commonly Used Words in the English Langua ge". Archived from the original on 13 January 2007. Retrieved 2007-01-14. Jump up ^ The Use and Non-Use of Articles ^ Jump up to: a b New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1999, usage note for an: "Th ere is still some divergence of opinion over the form of the indefinite article to use preceding certain words beginning with h- when the first syllable is unst ressed: a historical document or an historical document ; a hotel or an hotel . The for epends on whether the initial h is sounded or not: an was common in the 18th and 19th centuries, because the initial h was commonly not pronounced for these wor ds. In standard modern English the norm is for the h to be pronounced in words l ike hotel and historical, and therefore the indefinite article a is used; howeve r, the older form, with the silent h and the indefinite article an, is still enc ountered, especially among older speakers." ^ Jump up to: a b Brown Corpus and Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus, quoted in Peter s (2004: 1) Jump up ^ Algeo, p. 49. Jump up ^ www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199899/ldhansrd/vo990427/text/9042 7-43.htm. Jump up ^ Lawrence, Erma (1977). Haida dictionary. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Lang uage Center. p. 64. Jump up ^ ScienceDirect Master, Peter (1997) "The English Article System: acquis ition, function, and pedagogy" in: System, Volume 25, Issue 2, pp. 215 232 Jump up ^ Genetic Linguistics External links[edit] Wikisource has the text of the 1921 Collier's Encyclopedia article Artic le. [show] v t e

Lexical categories and their features Categories: Parts of speech Navigation menu Create accountLog inArticleTalkReadEditView history Search Main page Contents Featured content Privacy policyAbout WikipediaDisclaimersContact WikipediaDevelopersMobile viewWi kimedia Foundation Powered by MediaWiki