Article (grammar)

From Textus Receptus

An article (abbreviated ART) is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an. 'An' and 'a' are modern forms of the Old English 'an', which in Anglian dialects was the number 'one' (compare 'on', in Saxon dialects) and survived into Modern Scots as the number 'ane'. Both 'on' (respelled 'one' by the Normans) and 'an' survived into Modern English, with 'one' used as the number and 'an' ('a', before nouns that begin with a consonant) as an indefinite article.

The word some is thus used as a functional plural of a/an. "An apple" never means more than one apple. "Give me some apples" indicates more than one is desired but without specifying a quantity. This finds comparison in Spanish, where the indefinite article is completely indistinguishable from the single number, except that 'uno/una' ("one") has a plural form ('unos/unas'): Dame una manzana" ("Give me an apple") > "Dame unas manzanas" ("Give me some apples").

Among the classical parts of speech, articles are considered a special category of adjectives. Some modern linguists prefer to classify them within a separate part of speech, determiners.

In languages that employ articles, every common noun, with some exceptions, is expressed with a certain definiteness (e.g., definite or indefinite), just as many languages express every noun with a certain grammatical number (e.g., singular or plural). Every noun must be accompanied by the article, if any, corresponding to its definiteness, and the lack of an article (considered a zero article) itself specifies a certain definiteness. This is in contrast to other adjectives and determiners, which are typically optional. This obligatory nature of articles makes them among the most common words in many languages—in English, for example, the most frequent word is the.^[]

Types

Articles are usually characterized as either definite or indefinite.^[] A few languages with well-developed systems of articles may distinguish additional subtypes.

Within each type, languages may have various forms of each article, according to grammatical attributes such as gender, number, or case, or according to adjacent sounds.

Definite article

See Also Definite article

A definite article indicates that its noun is a particular one (or ones) identifiable to the listener. It may be the same thing that the speaker has already mentioned, or it may be something uniquely specified. The definite article in English is the.

The children know the fastest way home.

The sentence above contrasts with the much more general observation that:

Children know the fastest way home.

Likewise,

Give me the book

has a markedly different meaning in most English contexts from

Give me a book.

It can also be used to indicate a specific class among other classes:

The cabbage white butterfly lays its eggs on members of the Brassica genus.

But it should not be used to refer to a specimen:

*The writing is the human invention.

Indefinite article

See Also Indefinite article

An indefinite article indicates that its noun is not a particular one (or ones) identifiable to the listener. It may be something that the speaker is mentioning for the first time, or its precise identity may be irrelevant or hypothetical, or the speaker may be making a general statement about any such thing. English uses a/an, from the Old English forms of the number 'one', as its indefinite article. The form an is used before words that begin with a vowel sound (even if spelled with an initial consonant, as in an hour, and a before words that begin with a consonant sound (even if spelled with a vowel, as in a European).

She had a house so large that an elephant would get lost without a map.

Before some words beginning with a pronounced (not silent) h in an unstressed first syllable, such as hallucination, hilarious, historic(al), horrendous, and horrific, some (especially older) British writers prefer to use an over a (an historical event, etc.).^[] An is also preferred before hotel by some writers of BrE (probably reflecting the relatively recent adoption of the word from French, where the h is not pronounced).^[] The use of "an" before words beginning with an unstressed "h" is more common generally in BrE than American.^[] Such usage would now be seen as affected or incorrect in AmE.^[] American writers normally use a in all these cases, although there are occasional uses of an historic(al) in AmE.^[] According to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, such use is increasingly rare in BrE too.^[] Unlike BrE, AmE typically uses an before herb, since the h in this word is silent for most Americans.

Partitive article

A partitive article is a type of indefinite article used with a mass noun such as water, to indicate a non-specific quantity of it. Partitive articles are used in French and Italian in addition to definite and indefinite articles. The nearest equivalent in English is some, although this is considered a determiner and not an article.

French: Voulez-vous du café ?

Do you want (some) coffee? (or, dialectally but more accurately, Do you want some of this coffee?)

See also more information about the French partitive article.

Negative article

A negative article specifies none of its noun, and can thus be regarded as neither definite nor indefinite. On the other hand, some consider such a word to be a simple determiner rather than an article. In English, this function is fulfilled by no.

No man is an island.

Zero article

The zero article is the absence of an article. In languages having a definite article, the lack of an article specifically indicates that the noun is indefinite. Linguists interested in X-bar theory causally link zero articles to nouns lacking a determiner.^[] In English, the zero article rather than the indefinite is used with plurals and mass nouns, although the word "some" can be used as an indefinite plural article.

Visitors walked in mud.

Does the KJV fail to translate the Greek article properly?

The following is from the website kjvtoday.net:

It is often alleged that the KJV erroneously translates the Greek definite article (ο, η, τό) as an English indefinite article (a, an). An example is in Matthew 5:1: “he went up into a mountain.” The Greek says, “ανεβη εις το ορος,” which has the definite article “το” preceding “mountain (ορος).” The KJV is not in error. The definite article in Greek can function as a categorical article having a qualitative force (Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics at 228), in which case the English indefinite article could be a valid translation. As with Greek, the English definite article (the) can also be used to determine the category and nothing more. For example, we might say “On sunny days, people go to the beach.” Despite the definite article, no specific beach is implied. Thus we are actually saying, “On sunny days, people go to a beach.” “The beach” is a categorical determination, not a determination of a specific beach. The definite article’s purpose is only to determine the specific category, and not to determine the specific thing in the category. Likewise, when Matthew 5:1 says, “ανεβη εις το ορος,” “το” can be translated with the English indefinite article, signifying that the category of the location was a mountain as opposed to something else (e.g. town, beach). The NIV, which attempts to convey the sense of the passage, agrees with the KJV and reads, “he went up on a mountainside.”

Variation among languages

Articles in European languages

Among the world's most widely spoken languages, articles are found almost exclusively in Indo-European and Semitic languages. Strictly speaking, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Malay, and Russian have no articles, but certain words can be used like articles, when needed.

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 have definite or indefinite articles; there is no article in Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the Baltic languages and most Slavic languages. Although Classical Greek has a definite article (which has survived into Modern Greek and which bears strong resemblance to the German definite article), the earlier Homeric Greek did not. Articles developed independently in several language families.

Not all languages have both definite and indefinite articles. Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, have only a definite article. It is far less common, however, for a language to have an indefinite article without having a definite article.

Some languages have different types of definite and indefinite articles to distinguish finer shades of meaning; for example, French and Italian have a partitive article used for indefinite mass nouns, while Macedonian uses definite articles in a demonstrative sense, distinguishing this from that. The words this and that (and their plurals, these and those) can be understood in English as, ultimately, forms 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, number, or case of its noun. In some languages the article may be the only indication of the case, e.g., German Der Hut des Napoleon, "Napoleon's hat". Many languages do not use articles at all, and may use other ways of indicating old versus new information, such as topic-comment constructions.

Articles used in the world's most widely spoken languages
Language	definite article	indefinite article	partitive article
Arabic	al-	(none)
English	the	a, an
German	der, die, das des, dem, den	ein, eine, einer einem, einen
Dutch	de, het de	een
Tamazight	__	yan, yat ittsn,ittsnt
Spanish	el, la los, las	un, una unos, unas
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

In the above examples, the article always precedes its noun. In some languages, however, the definite article is not always a separate word, but may be postfixed, attached to the end of its noun as a suffix. For example,

Albanian: plis, a white fez, plisi the white fez
Romanian: drum, road; drumul, the road
Icelandic: hestur, horse; hesturinn, the horse
Norwegian: stol, chair; stolen, the chair
Swedish: hus house; huset the house
Bulgarian: стол stol, chair; столът stolǎt, the chair (subject); стола stola, the chair (object)
Macedonian: стол stol, chair; столот stolot, the chair; столов stolov, this chair; столон stolon, that chair

Evolution

Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe. Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of certain adjectives.

Joseph Greenberg ^[] describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in 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 articles may evolve anew from demonstratives.

Definite articles

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 þe in Middle English, derives from an Old English demonstrative, which, according to gender, was written se (masculine), seo (feminine), or þæt (neuter). The neuter form þæt 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 þ^e, where the letter thorn (þ) 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 столот (stolot), the chair; столов (stolov), this chair; and столон (stolon), that chair.

Indefinite articles

Indefinite articles typically arise from adjectives meaning one. For example, the indefinite articles in the Romance languages—e.g., un, una, une—derive from the Latin adjective unus. Partitive articles, however, derive from Vulgar Latin de illo, meaning (some) of the.

The English indefinite article an is derived from the same root as one. The -n came to be dropped before consonants, giving rise to the shortened form a. The existence of both forms has led to many cases of juncture loss, e.g. transforming the original a napron into the modern an apron.

References

External links

WALS - Feature/Chapter 38: Indefinite Articles
WALS - Feature/Chapter 37: Definite Articles

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