Definite Article Reduction - History

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.