History
DAR has been recorded in textual form since 1673, and the orthographic representations "t'" and "th'" occur in literature (such as in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights) and are frequently encountered in the media. There is even a beer called "T'owd Tup" (The Old Ram). The historical origin is unclear. Links with Middle English te forms of the article remain unproved.
A similar usage of an article without a vowel "t'" can also be found in the Frisian language of the north Netherlands coast, the modern language thought to be most similar to the original language of the invading Anglo-Saxons.
The family name "Haus in't Feld" exists in Frisian, meaning "house in the field". Claims that this is phonetically similar to DAR remain to be verified experimentally. In Cumbria, a voiceless alveolar plosive (the English t sound) does occur, which may have some superficial similarities to realisations in Frisian and Low German, but the glottal and glottalised DAR variants found elsewhere in the DAR area and across Yorkshire present a very different realisation. Jones (2002: 342) comments that no contact explanation with other varieties of Germanic is required (or could be supported on the basis of available evidence) to explain DAR as the development of DAR involves common cross-linguistic patterns of change (stopping of dental fricatives, change of plosive to glottal) that occur in unrelated languages and so have a purely phonetic origin.
Read more about this topic: Definite Article Reduction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)