Timeline for How is definiteness expressed in languages with no definite article, clitic or affix?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 10, 2022 at 2:18 | history | edited | hippietrail | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fix ancient typo/thinko
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| S May 10, 2022 at 2:17 | history | suggested | Glorfindel | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
broken link fixed
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| May 9, 2022 at 8:06 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S May 10, 2022 at 2:17 | |||||
| Oct 16, 2013 at 12:54 | comment | added | hippietrail | Yes I was also thinking about the indefinite articles. I think if such a language were discovered and analysed afresh today the terminology might be different. Oh yes I completely forgot about the free-standing definite articles - that's how rusty my Scandinavian knowledge has become. It does make more sense in that regard though I would still personally talk about the articles under a heading of definiteness rather than including the fusional endings under the heading of articles, which is I think what the literature mostly does currently. | |
| Oct 16, 2013 at 12:33 | comment | added | dainichi | I'm sorry if my language was harsh, that was not my intention. I guess they're suffixes alright, but they're fusional. Maybe they're called articles in the tradition of other Germanic/IE languages, where definiteness tends to be expressed with articles that are at least clitics. Also, Scandinavian languages do have free-standing indefinite articles, so it seems natural to talk about a definite article as well. Also, to make matters even more complicated, Scandinavian languages also have free-standing definite articles which are used when definite nouns are modified by adjectives. | |
| Oct 16, 2013 at 11:57 | comment | added | hippietrail | Ouch. 'fail to see' is a bit defensive. It seems my knowledge of Scandinavian is not very good. In light of this it seems even more odd to ever call it an "article" or "suffix" rather than just treating "definiteness" as a category of the nominal inflection. | |
| Oct 16, 2013 at 11:37 | comment | added | dainichi | I know I've pointed this out before, but the Scandinavian definite articles also depend on number/gender/noun class and are fused with the plural markers. I fail to see how Albanian and Romanian differ fundamentally from this. Example from Danish: human/the ~/~s/the ~s = menneske/~t/~r/~ne. As you can see, the plural definite article ~ne is not a combination of the plural marker ~r and singular definite article ~t. | |
| Oct 7, 2011 at 21:33 | history | edited | hippietrail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
some links for topic-comment languages
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| Oct 7, 2011 at 20:47 | history | edited | hippietrail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
albanian example, romanian example, demonstrative was a word i was trying to think of earlier; hebrew particle
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| Oct 7, 2011 at 20:35 | history | edited | hippietrail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
albanian example, romanian example, demonstrative was a word i was trying to think of earlier
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| Oct 7, 2011 at 20:29 | history | edited | hippietrail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
albanian example
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| Oct 7, 2011 at 20:22 | history | answered | hippietrail | CC BY-SA 3.0 |