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third-pdf-sile-for

Uploaded by

Riyad Ali
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Crosslinguistic variation

[edit]

Articles in languages in and around Europe

indefinite and definite articles

only definite articles

indefinite and suffixed definite articles

only suffixed definite articles

no articles

Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages, Polynesian languages, and
even language isolates such as Basque; however, they are formally absent from many of the world's
major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, many Turkic
languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic
languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, the Dravidian
languages (incl. Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada), the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages,
the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North
Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is
mandatory in all cases.

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 or Sanskrit, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the families
of Slavic languages (except for Bulgarian and Macedonian, which are rather distinctive among the
Slavic languages in their grammar, and some Northern Russian dialects [7]), Baltic languages and
many Indo-Aryan languages. Although Classical Greek had a definite article (which has survived
into Modern Greek and which bears strong functional resemblance to the German definite article,
which it is related to), the earlier Homeric Greek used this article largely as a pronoun or
demonstrative, whereas the earliest known form of Greek known as Mycenaean Greek did not have
any articles. 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 shades of meaning: for
example, French and Italian have a partitive article used for indefinite mass nouns,
whereas Colognian has two distinct sets of definite articles 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, 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. Many languages do not use
articles at all, and may use other ways of indicating old versus new information, such as topic–
comment constructions.

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