3

I came across a previous question (Why does English have an indefinite article ?) about the origins of the English indefinite article which question was closed due to it being posed in an - ironically - indefinite manner, without a real focus to the question.

I have an ongoing interest from a conceptual point of view.

Daniel B Wallace in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics states of the Greek article (there is only one in Greek) :

One of the greatest gifts bequeathed by the Greeks to Western civilization was the article. [p207.]

Daniel Wallace states of the article (that is to say, the idea of an article per se) that it identifies.

The function of the article is not, primarily, to make something definite. The article intrinsically has the ability to conceptualize.

He argues that without an article one is discussing a quality that can only be described. The article, by its very presence, indicates that a concept is identifiable. If identifiable, then the entity or object may be titled or named, and may, thus, be conceptualised as a thing rather than as a quality.

This division between quality and identity is a strong feature of Greek.

If what Wallace says is true, concerning the gift bequeathed by Greek to Western civilization, then why was it necessary (conceptually) to introduce other articles ? And, if Peter Masters also is correct (and I do not doubt that he is so) why do we now have five articles in English (zero-some-a/an-the-null) ?

Why do we need, conceptually, more than quality/identity in English ? is my question.

Nigel J
  • 24,448
  • 5
    It's not just English. It's, also, for instance, all the Romance languages. – Lambie Dec 24 '19 at 16:36
  • @Lambie . . . . which also interests me, since it is the concept that I am after. But taking English as the example, of course. – Nigel J Dec 24 '19 at 16:43
  • Try Latin unus. Merry, merry! – Lambie Dec 24 '19 at 17:17
  • "The book" identifies a specific book. "A book" lets us discuss something we can't specify down to an individual object. It gives us a way to talk about something more abstract than a single physical object. – The Photon Dec 24 '19 at 17:37
  • @ThePhoton So, the quality of 'bookness'. But why not just call it 'book' ? Then 'the book' is the identifiable item. – Nigel J Dec 24 '19 at 17:39
  • @Nijel, not a quality of bookness, an uncertainty about which book we're discussing. – The Photon Dec 24 '19 at 17:41
  • Basically, some Dist got Pist about not having a term, and so came up with "indefinite article". – Hot Licks Dec 24 '19 at 18:58
  • 1
    We need to be clear about which languages have or do not have an indefinite (or definite, for that matter) article. Many languages use an indefinite article, using the word ‘one’. Some languages, such as Russian, have no definite article. Nor did Latin. Strictly ancient Greek did have a sort of indefinite article, the enclitic word (called an indefinite pronoun) ‘tis’ (τις). Wallace’s use of the word ‘identifies’ is a little misleading, if it gets us into ideas of ‘identity’. A better word would be ‘specifies’. [continued] – Tuffy Dec 24 '19 at 19:26
  • The enclitic ‘tis is more than an article. It is usually translated 'certain' or 'kind of' or 'such as'. It is comparative. It describes something with a quality like something else. – Nigel J Dec 24 '19 at 19:37
  • OED says that it is originally a variant of one adj., reflecting an unstressed pronunciation of the word and adds that "from the early an , a, pronounced proclitically without stress, arose the ‘indefinite article’ a adj.". In OED, the word "one" has the sense "indefinite article a adj." (now chiefly regional) also and it goes back to early Old English with early forms like "an, ane, ænne, one, oon". OED also explains how the forms of the numeral and of the indefinite article were differentiated or not in the history. – ermanen Dec 24 '19 at 21:48
  • 4
    Wallace is just being a Greek scholar, that's all. To a Greek scholar, all the good things we have came from the Greeks, and this is just another example. There is no connection whatsoever between any Greek article (or pronoun) and any English article, or pronoun. Except that both languages are Indo-European, and therefore have cognate roots here and there. – John Lawler Dec 25 '19 at 01:30
  • English is a Germanic language. So why not assume the articles in English came from articles in previous Germanic languages? – GEdgar Jan 03 '20 at 17:55
  • @GEdgar because it seems that they didn't? – phoog Feb 03 '20 at 03:56
  • And specifically, Old English didn't really have an indefinite article (although Old French did). – Stuart F Jan 17 '23 at 22:52

2 Answers2

3

(Let me say that it is very unlikely that other European languages developed articles because of Greek)

Why it spawned is basically unanswerable, but as for where it came from - in European languages, definite articles tend to come from determiners ('this', 'that' - note that Italian il, Spanish el, French le all come from Latin ille), whereas indefinite articles tend to come from the number 'one' (again with the example of the Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish un all come from unus.)

Indeed, in Old English, 'an' and 'one' were the same word, ān.

Angelos
  • 391
1

Of course the answer to these sort of questions are always at best educated speculation. Why words mean what they do is dependent on the cumulative decisions of tens of millions of people most of whom are dead, and most of whom lived in a very different world, linguistic environment and society than we do.

However, if I might add my (perhaps uneducated) speculation, I'd say it seems the answer is in the etymology. "The" in English comes ultimately from demonstrative pronouns like "this" or "that" whereas "a" comes from "one", as in the number one. This is also true in many other languages, including most Romance languages.

And so if we consider these sentences:

It is that book. I went to that party. This man is the leader.

compared to

It is one book. I went to one party. One man is the leader.

I think it is evident how these usages capture the idea of definiteness and indefiniteness, and how, through time, it could transform into the meanings we have today. If we step away from the strictly cardinal meaning of "one" it is easy to understand these sentences as:

It is one book (among many). I went to one party (among many). One man (among the many) is the leader.

It is also worth considering the relationship of "one" in the sense of the indefinite personal pronoun. The indefiniteness is captured even today in that specific usage. For example, compare these two sentences:

One should pay one's taxes.

verses:

You should pay your taxes.

The second is rather accusatory, and in many respects the difference in meaning is specifically one of indefiniteness, which is to say the first does not refer to a particular person, but an indefinite person, whereas the second refers to a specific person.

And so I think in this one can see that "one" is used in less of a cardinal, numeric sense even in today's language.

Fraser Orr
  • 16,783