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.[1]

Contents
[hide]

 1 Types
o 1.1 Definite article
o 1.2 Indefinite article
o 1.3 Partitive article
o 1.4 Negative article
o 1.5 Zero article
 2 Variation among languages
 3 Evolution
o 3.1 Definite articles
o 3.2 Indefinite articles
 4 See also
 5 References
  6 External links

[edit] Types
Articles are usually characterized as either definite or indefinite.[2] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.).[3] 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).[4] The use of "an" before words beginning with an
unstressed "h" is more common generally in BrE than American.[4] Such usage would now be
seen as affected or incorrect in AmE.[5] American writers normally use a in all these cases,
although there are occasional uses of an historic(al) in AmE.[6] According to the New Oxford
Dictionary of English, such use is increasingly rare in BrE too.[3] Unlike BrE, AmE typically uses
an before herb, since the h in this word is silent for most Americans.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.[7] 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.

[edit] Variation among languages

Articles in European languages      indefinite and definite articles      only definite articles
indefinite and postfixed definite articles      only postfixed definite articles      no articles

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
der, die, das ein, eine, einer
German
des, dem, den einem, einen
de, het
Dutch een
de
yan, yat
Tamazight __
ittsn,ittsnt
el, la un, una
Spanish
los, las unos, unas
o, a um, uma
Portuguese
os, as uns, umas
le, la, l' un, une du, de la
French
les des de l', des
il, lo, la, l' del, dello, della, dell'
Italian un, uno, una, un'
i, gli, le dei, degli, degl' , delle