மனைவி மாற்றம்
நான்பர்களுக்கு என் வனக்கம் இது என் முதல் கதை நான் ஆசைபடும் ஒன்றை கதையாக் சொல்கிறேன். எழ்த்து பிழை இலக்கன் பிழையை மன்னிக்கவும்.
என் பெயர் செல்வா எனக்கு கல்யனம் அகி 2 வருடங்கல் அகிரது என் மனைவி பெயர் அனித எனக்கு வயது 24 என் மனைவிக்கு 20 நான் ஒரு பத்திரிகயில் வெலை செய்கிரென். இன்னும் குழந்தை பக்கியம் இல்லை. எனக்கு செக்சில் அர்வம் அதிகம் என் மனைவிக்கும் தன். நான்றாக அனுபவிப்போம் அனல் நாளாக குறைந்து போனது. அப்பொது தன் என் வழ்கயில் எனக்கு ஒரு மற்றம் ஏற்பட்டது என் நன்பனல்.
என் நன்பன் அஷொக் விட்டிர்கு ஒரு நல் இரவு சென்றேன். அபோது கம்புட்டரில் எதொ வெலை செய்து கொன்டிருந்தன் .
எப்பிடி இருக்க அஷொக்
நல்ல இருகென் ட நி எப்படி இருக்கே
இம் பைன் ட
என்ன ட பன்ர
பிட்டு படம் பக்குரென்ட
என்ன ட சொல்லுறே
அமாம் மச்சி
சிடில பக்குரிய ட
இல்லட இன்டெர்னெட்டுல பக்குரென்டா
இண்டர்நெட்டுல் இதுகுடவ வரும்.
அடப்பவி இப்பொ இண்டர்நெடுல் இது தன் அதிகம வருது இங்க பரு. என்று அவன் அதை கன்பித்தான் அது கன் கொல்ல காட்சியக இருந்தது .விதவிதமன பென்கல் புகை படஙல் இருதது.
எந்த பென்னடொ படம் டா பர்கலம்
எதாவது பொடுட
இந்த பொண்ணு சுப்பர இருக்குட இதை பார்க்கலாம் .என்ட்ரு க்லிக் செய்தன் அது லொட் அனது
அதில் அழகன பென்னுடென் இரென்டு பெர் சேக்ச் செய்துகொன்டிருந்தர்கல்.என்னக்கு பெட்ச வரவில்லை. நிறைய படஙல் இருந்தது மாத்தி மாத்தி பார்த்தோம்
இதுகெல்லம் காசு பொகுமாட
இல்லட மச்சி இது அன்லிமிட்டெட் எவ்வலௌ பர்தலும் மாசம் 1000 ருபை தன் செலவகும்.
சன்செ இல்லட எவ்வலவு படம் எவ்வலவு அழகன பொன்னுங்க இவ்வஙல் நுடெஅ இன்டெர்னெடுல பார்க்க முடியுது.
இதுக்கெய் அசந்துட்ட
இனெடெர்னெட்டுல பொன்னுக குட பெசலம் டயம் பிக்ச் பன்னி மெட்ரு பான்னலாம் இதுல நிரய கல்யானம் ஆன பொன்னுக தான் அதிகம மாட்டும். எனக்கு பயம் வந்தது. ஏன் என்ட்ரல் என் விட்டில் கம்ப்யுட்டர் இன்டெர்னெட் இருக்கிறது என் மனைவி எப்பொது பர்தலும் இன்டெர்னெடில் தன் இருப்பால் அவலௌம் இதில் படம் பர்திருப்பலொ எவனுடனவது பெசியிருப்பலொ என்று எனக்கு சந்தெகம் வந்தது. என் விட்டில் கம்ப்யுட்டர் இருந்தலூம் நன் அதை உபயொகிக்க மட்டென் . இதில் இவ்வலவு விசயம் இருக்கிரடு என்று எனக்கு இன்று தன் தெரியும்
சரிட மச்சன் நன் வரன்டா லெட் அயிடிசு என் மனைவி வெய்ட் பன்னுவ
சரிட பாய்
அன்ட்ரு விட்டிர்கு வருவதர்குல் எனக்கு அயிரம் சினதனைகல். என் மனைவி மிது எனக்கு சந்தெகம் வந்துவிட்டது. விட்டில் டிவி இருந்தலும் அவல் இன்டர்நெட்டில் தான் அதிகம் இருக்கிறாள் . அப்படி அவல் என்ன தான் செய்வால். நன் காலை 8 மனிக்கு வெலிய பொய்டுவென் விட்டிர்கு இரவு 7.30 க்கு தான் செல்வேன் எவனுடனவது கல்ல தொடர்பு வைதிருப்பலொ என்ட்ரு எனக்கு தெவை இல்லத நினைவுகலுடன் விட்டிர்கு சென்றன்
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Article (grammar)
For articles in English, see English articles.
"Definite article" redirects here. For the Eddie Izzard comedy DVD, see Definite Article.
Question book-new.svg
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2008)
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 sound) 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
1 Types
1.1 Definite article
1.2 Indefinite article
1.3 Partitive article
1.4 Negative article
1.5 Zero article
2 Variation among languages
3 Evolution
3.1 Definite articles
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 some languages in and around Europe
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[citation needed]. 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, 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.
Articles used in the world's most widely spoken languages Language definite article indefinite article partitive article
Arabic al- None
English the a, an
German der, die, das
des, dem, den ein, eine, einer
einem, einen
Dutch de, het
de een
Tamazight __ yan, yat
ittsn,ittsnt
Spanish el, la
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
Hungarian a, az egy
In the above examples, the article always precedes its noun (with the exception of the Arabic tanween). In some languages, however, the definite article is not always a separate word, but may be postfixed, attached to the end of its noun as a suffix. For example,
Albanian: plis, a white fez; plisi, the white fez
Romanian: drum, road; drumul, the road
Icelandic: hestur, horse; hesturinn, the horse
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
[edit] Evolution
Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe. Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of certain adjectives.
Joseph Greenberg [8][9] describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually articles may evolve anew from demonstratives.
[edit] Definite articles
Definite articles typically arise from demonstratives meaning that. For example, the definite articles in the Romance languages—e.g., el, il, le, la—derive from the Latin demonstratives ille (masculine) and illa (feminine).
The English definite article the, written þe in Middle English, derives from an Old English demonstrative, which, according to gender, was written se (masculine), seo (feminine) (þe and þeo in the Northumbrian dialect), or þæt (neuter). The neuter form þæt also gave rise to the modern demonstrative that. The ye occasionally seen in pseudo-archaic usage such as "Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe" is actually a form of þe, where the letter thorn (þ) came to be written as a y.
Multiple demonstratives can give rise to multiple definite articles. Macedonian, for example, in which the articles are suffixed, has столот (stolot), the chair; столов (stolov), this chair; and столон (stolon), that chair. Colognian prepositions articles such as in dat Auto, or et Auto, the car; the first being specifically selected, focussed, newly introduced, while the latter ist not selected, unfocussed, already known, general, or generic.
[edit] Indefinite articles
Indefinite articles typically arise from adjectives meaning one. For example, the indefinite articles in the Romance languages—e.g., un, una, une—derive from the Latin adjective unus. Partitive articles, however, derive from Vulgar Latin de illo, meaning (some) of the.
The English indefinite article an is derived from the same root as one. The -n came to be dropped before consonants, giving rise to the shortened form a. The existence of both forms has led to many cases of juncture loss, e.g. transforming the original a napron into the modern an apron.
[edit] See also
English articles
Al- (definite article in Arabic)
Definiteness
Definite description
[edit] References
^ World English. "The 500 Most Commonly Used Words in the English Language". Retrieved 2007-01-14.
^ The Use and Non-Use of Articles
^ a b New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1999, usage note for an: "There is still some divergence of opinion over the form of the indefinite article to use preceding certain words beginning with h- when the first syllable is unstressed: ‘a historical document’ or ‘an historical document’; ‘a hotel’ or ‘an hotel’. The form depends on whether the initial h is sounded or not: an was common in the 18th and 19th centuries, because the initial h was commonly not pronounced for these words. In standard modern English the norm is for the h to be pronounced in words like hotel and historical, and therefore the indefinite article a is used; however, the older form, with the silent h and the indefinite article an, is still encountered, especially among older speakers."
^ a b Brown Corpus and Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus, quoted in Peters (2004: 1)
^ [1]
^ Algeo, p. 49.
^ ScienceDirect Master, Peter (1997) "The English Article System: acquisition, function, and pedagogy" in: System, Volume 25, Issue 2, pp. 215–232
^ Word structure Universals of human language
^ Genetic Linguistics
[edit] External links
Wikisource has the text of the 1921 Collier's Encyclopedia article Article.
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"Definite article" redirects here. For the Eddie Izzard comedy DVD, see Definite Article.
Question book-new.svg
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2008)
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 sound) 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
1 Types
1.1 Definite article
1.2 Indefinite article
1.3 Partitive article
1.4 Negative article
1.5 Zero article
2 Variation among languages
3 Evolution
3.1 Definite articles
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 some languages in and around Europe
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[citation needed]. 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, 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.
Articles used in the world's most widely spoken languages Language definite article indefinite article partitive article
Arabic al- None
English the a, an
German der, die, das
des, dem, den ein, eine, einer
einem, einen
Dutch de, het
de een
Tamazight __ yan, yat
ittsn,ittsnt
Spanish el, la
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
Hungarian a, az egy
In the above examples, the article always precedes its noun (with the exception of the Arabic tanween). In some languages, however, the definite article is not always a separate word, but may be postfixed, attached to the end of its noun as a suffix. For example,
Albanian: plis, a white fez; plisi, the white fez
Romanian: drum, road; drumul, the road
Icelandic: hestur, horse; hesturinn, the horse
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
[edit] Evolution
Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe. Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of certain adjectives.
Joseph Greenberg [8][9] describes "the cycle of the definite article": Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually articles may evolve anew from demonstratives.
[edit] Definite articles
Definite articles typically arise from demonstratives meaning that. For example, the definite articles in the Romance languages—e.g., el, il, le, la—derive from the Latin demonstratives ille (masculine) and illa (feminine).
The English definite article the, written þe in Middle English, derives from an Old English demonstrative, which, according to gender, was written se (masculine), seo (feminine) (þe and þeo in the Northumbrian dialect), or þæt (neuter). The neuter form þæt also gave rise to the modern demonstrative that. The ye occasionally seen in pseudo-archaic usage such as "Ye Olde Englishe Tea Shoppe" is actually a form of þe, where the letter thorn (þ) came to be written as a y.
Multiple demonstratives can give rise to multiple definite articles. Macedonian, for example, in which the articles are suffixed, has столот (stolot), the chair; столов (stolov), this chair; and столон (stolon), that chair. Colognian prepositions articles such as in dat Auto, or et Auto, the car; the first being specifically selected, focussed, newly introduced, while the latter ist not selected, unfocussed, already known, general, or generic.
[edit] Indefinite articles
Indefinite articles typically arise from adjectives meaning one. For example, the indefinite articles in the Romance languages—e.g., un, una, une—derive from the Latin adjective unus. Partitive articles, however, derive from Vulgar Latin de illo, meaning (some) of the.
The English indefinite article an is derived from the same root as one. The -n came to be dropped before consonants, giving rise to the shortened form a. The existence of both forms has led to many cases of juncture loss, e.g. transforming the original a napron into the modern an apron.
[edit] See also
English articles
Al- (definite article in Arabic)
Definiteness
Definite description
[edit] References
^ World English. "The 500 Most Commonly Used Words in the English Language". Retrieved 2007-01-14.
^ The Use and Non-Use of Articles
^ a b New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1999, usage note for an: "There is still some divergence of opinion over the form of the indefinite article to use preceding certain words beginning with h- when the first syllable is unstressed: ‘a historical document’ or ‘an historical document’; ‘a hotel’ or ‘an hotel’. The form depends on whether the initial h is sounded or not: an was common in the 18th and 19th centuries, because the initial h was commonly not pronounced for these words. In standard modern English the norm is for the h to be pronounced in words like hotel and historical, and therefore the indefinite article a is used; however, the older form, with the silent h and the indefinite article an, is still encountered, especially among older speakers."
^ a b Brown Corpus and Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus, quoted in Peters (2004: 1)
^ [1]
^ Algeo, p. 49.
^ ScienceDirect Master, Peter (1997) "The English Article System: acquisition, function, and pedagogy" in: System, Volume 25, Issue 2, pp. 215–232
^ Word structure Universals of human language
^ Genetic Linguistics
[edit] External links
Wikisource has the text of the 1921 Collier's Encyclopedia article Article.
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