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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Indefinite article - THE EXAMPLE!!!
In-Reply-To: millert@grad.csee.usf.edu's message of 7 Oct 1994 03:17:43 GMT
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Date: Mon, 10 Oct 1994 18:55:50 GMT
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In article <372ekn$p0d@mother.usf.edu> millert@grad.csee.usf.edu
(Timothy Miller) writes:

>If Latin had no articles, where did the ones in Spanish, French, Italian, and
>other Latin derivatives come from?

The definite articles derive from demonstrative adjectives ("that man" > "the
man"), usually from ille/illa/illud, though Sardinian (and apparently to some
extent Catalan) used ipse/ipsa/ipsud instead.

The indefinite article, if one exists, generally derives from unus/una/unum
"one"; a similar process took place in the histories of German and English.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
