Variation Among Languages
Articles are found in many Indo-European and Semitic languages but are absent from some other large languages of the world, such as Indonesian, Japanese, Hindi and Russian.
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, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the families of Slavic languages (not including Bulgarian/Macedonian, which are rather distinctive among the Slavic languages in terms of grammar anyway) and Baltic 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, 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, while Colognian has two distinct sets of definite articles indicating focus and uniqueness, and Macedonian uses definite articles in a demonstrative sense, distinguishing this from that (with an intermediate degree). 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.
| Language | definite article | indefinite article | partitive article |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic | al- or el ال (prefix) | None | |
| Hebrew | ha- ה (prefix) | None | |
| Greek | ο, η, το οι, οι, τα |
ένας, μια, ένα | |
| English | the | a, an | some |
| German | der, die, das des, dem, den |
ein, eine, einer, eines einem, einen |
|
| Dutch | de, het de |
een | |
| Tamazight | __ | yan, yat ittsn, ittsnt |
|
| Spanish | el, la, lo 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 |
| Urdu | mohtaram, janab | None | |
| Hungarian | a, az | egy |
In the above examples, the article always precedes its noun (with the exception of the Arabic tanween and the Hebrew ה ha-). In some languages, however, the definite article is not always a separate word, but may be suffixed, attached to the end of its noun as a suffix. For example,
- Albanian: plis, a white fez; plisi, the white fez
- Urdu: mohtaram, janab;
- Bengali: "Boi", book; "Boiti/Boita/Boikhana" : "The Book"
- Romanian: drum, road; drumul, the road (the article is just "l", "u" is a "connection vowel" Romanian: vocală de legătură)
- Icelandic: hestur, horse; hesturinn, the horse
- Persian: sib, apple; sibe, the apple
- 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
Example of prefixed definite article:
- Hebrew: ילד, transcribed as yeled, a boy; הילד, transcribed as ha-yeled, the boy
A different way, limited to the definitive article, is used by Latvian. The noun doesn't change but the adjective can be defined or undefined: galds, a table / the table; balts galds, a white table; baltais galds, the white table.
Read more about this topic: Article (grammar)
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