French, Spanish, and Italian are all mainly derived from Latin. Latin doesn’t have any definite articles (as far as I know), yet all of these languages do. Spanish has el, la, los, and las; French has le, la, and les; Italian has il, la, i, le and some more. So, why do these languages have definite articles, and why are they all so similar? What about indefinite articles?
Good question for the General Questions forum.
P.S. They all have indefinite articles too.
P.P.S. These languages all derive there definite articles from the Latin *ille, illa, illud… *
Sorry, this was supposed to be in General Questions…Could a mod please move it?
I don’t doubt you’re correct, autz, but you raise some more questions. Illa agricola would usually translate as “that farmer”, not “the farmer”, and “the farmer” would become simply agricola in classical Latin. “That” becomes ese in Spanish and ce in French. So when did a demonstrative pronoun become a definite article and where did the new demonstrative pronouns come from?
And on a related note: Why are French demonstrative pronouns so different from Spanish, not only in spelling/pronounciation but usage as well?
Moderator’s Note: Moving from Great Debates to General Questions.
Demonstrative pronouns have a way of turning into definite articles in various language families.
Latin ille > Italian il, French le, etc.
English the comes from a Germanic demonstrative pronoun. Old English se, originally meaning ‘that’, crossed with the th- from the oblique form that, is the ancestor of Modern English the. Old English se came from the Proto-Indo-European demonstrative nominative case pronoun *so- ‘this, that’, which also produced the Greek article ho and the Latin demonstrative sic. The Proto-Indo-European demonstrative pronoun *to- was used for oblique cases; the Old English instrumental case of se was the ‘by the’.
The ha- in Arabic hâdhâ ‘this’ and Hebrew ha-zeh ‘this’ is from the Proto-Semitic source of Hebrew ha ‘the’. The Arabic article al- is likewise derived from a Proto-Semitic pronoun form.
The Hungarian definite article a is a shortened form of az ‘that’; which is obvious since the article reverts to its long form az before a word beginning with a vowel.
In all these examples, the definite article grows out of a specialized usage of a demonstrative pronoun.
That it happened is not in doubt, but the question was why. Certainly some languages do not have articles (e.g. Russian) and others do. The only conclusion is that they are not absolutely necessary but are sufficiently useful that people tend to create them. And I guess demonstrative pronouns are already close in meaning.
Incidentally, the articles in French at least, is not the same as the English since the French definite article is often used where we would use the indefinite article or a plural. When the province of Quebec attempts to produce English translations, the worst mistakes are in the use of articles. (“The student will register…”.)