Insular Danish (Danish: Ømål ) are the traditional Danish dialects spoken on the islands of Zealand , Langeland , Funen , Falster , Lolland , and Møn . They are recorded in the Dictionary of Danish Insular Dialects ( Ømålsordbogen ) which has been collected since the 1920s, and published in biannual volumes since 1992. There are significant differences between the different insular varieties, but they also share a number of features. A major difference is between Modern Danish and the traditional insular dialects are that some of them lack the stød but kept the tonal accent. Also, they kept three noun genders.
71-447: Insular Danish kept three grammatical genders , but most other Danish varieties reduced the gender system to two. By 1900, Zealand insular dialects had been reduced to two genders under the influence from the standard language, but other varieties like Funen dialect had not. The old Insular or Funen dialect could also use personal pronouns in certain cases, particularly to refer to animals. A classic example in traditional Funen dialect
142-537: A mass noun such as water , to indicate a non-specific quantity of it. Partitive articles are a class of determiner ; they are used in French and Italian in addition to definite and indefinite articles. (In Finnish and Estonian , the partitive is indicated by inflection.) The nearest equivalent in English is some , although it is classified as a determiner , and English uses it less than French uses de . Haida has
213-400: A bridge ( German : Brücke , f. ) more often used the words 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'pretty', and 'slender', while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is masculine ( puente , m. ), used 'big', 'dangerous', 'strong', and 'sturdy' more often. However, studies of this kind have been criticized on various grounds and yield an unclear pattern of results overall. A noun may belong to
284-400: A broader category called determiners , which also include demonstratives , possessive determiners , and quantifiers . In linguistic interlinear glossing , articles are abbreviated as ART . A definite article is an article that marks a definite noun phrase . Definite articles, such as the English the , are used to refer to a particular member of a group. It may be something that
355-674: A definite article (which has survived into Modern Greek and which bears strong functional resemblance to the German definite article, which it is related to), the earlier Homeric Greek used this article largely as a pronoun or demonstrative, whereas the earliest known form of Greek known as Mycenaean Greek did not have any articles. 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
426-624: A determiner. 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. Articles are found in many Indo-European languages , Semitic languages (only the definite article) , and Polynesian languages ; however, they are formally absent from many of the world's major languages including Chinese , Japanese , Korean , Mongolian , many Turkic languages (including Tatar , Bashkir , Tuvan and Chuvash ), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic and Saami languages ), Hindi-Urdu , Punjabi , Tamil ,
497-582: A fully independent state following the collapse of the Soviet Union , it requested that formal mentions of its name omit the article. Similar shifts in usage have occurred in the names of Sudan and both Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa) ; a move in the other direction occurred with The Gambia . In certain languages, such as French and Italian, definite articles are used with all or most names of countries: la France , le Canada , l'Allemagne ; l'Italia , la Spagna , il Brasile . If
568-401: A given class because of characteristic features of its referent , such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in
639-445: A language relate to sex, such as when an animate –inanimate distinction is made. Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre ) which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. A classifier, or measure word , is a word or morpheme used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other determiners to be applied to
710-462: A language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote (for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc.), although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any obvious reason. However it
781-690: A longer phrase in which the name is a specifier, i.e. the Amazon River , the Hebridean Islands . Where the nouns in such longer phrases cannot be omitted, the definite article is universally kept: the United States , the People's Republic of China . This distinction can sometimes become a political matter: the former usage the Ukraine stressed the word's Russian meaning of "borderlands"; as Ukraine became
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#1732854621004852-717: A name [has] a definite article, e.g. the Kremlin , it cannot idiomatically be used without it: we cannot say Boris Yeltsin is in Kremlin . Some languages use definite articles with personal names , as in Portuguese ( a Maria , literally: "the Maria"), Greek ( η Μαρία , ο Γιώργος , ο Δούναβης , η Παρασκευή ), and Catalan ( la Núria , el / en Oriol ). Such usage also occurs colloquially or dialectally in Spanish , German , French , Italian and other languages. In Hungarian ,
923-417: A noun manifests itself in two principal ways: in the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, and in modifications of other related words ( agreement ). Grammatical gender manifests itself when words related to a noun like determiners , pronouns or adjectives change their form ( inflect ) according to the gender of noun they refer to ( agreement ). The parts of speech affected by gender agreement,
994-476: A particular man. The word he , which is the indefinite article in Tokelauan, is used to describe ‘any such item’, and is encountered most often with negatives and interrogatives. An example of the use of he as an indefinite article is “ Vili ake oi k'aumai he toki ”, where ‘ he toki ’ mean ‘ an axe ’. The use of he and te in Tokelauan are reserved for when describing a singular noun. However, when describing
1065-468: A partitive article (suffixed -gyaa ) referring to "part of something or... to one or more objects of a given group or category," e.g., tluugyaa uu hal tlaahlaang "he is making a boat (a member of the category of boats)." 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
1136-447: A partitive article used for indefinite mass nouns , whereas Colognian has two distinct sets of definite articles indicating focus and uniqueness, and Macedonian uses definite articles in a demonstrative sense, with a tripartite distinction (proximal, medial, distal) based on distance from the speaker or interlocutor. The words this and that (and their plurals, these and those ) can be understood in English as, ultimately, forms of
1207-406: A plural noun, different articles are used. For plural definite nouns, rather than te , the article nā is used. ‘ Vili ake oi k'aumai nā nofoa ’ in Tokelauan would translate to “ Do run and bring me the chairs ” in English. There are some special cases in which instead of using nā , plural definite nouns have no article before them. The absence of an article is represented by 0 . One way that it
1278-404: A role in the selection of a definite article more than the lexical entry attached to the article. Some languages (such as the continental North Germanic languages , Bulgarian or Romanian ) have definite articles only as suffixes . An indefinite article is an article that marks an indefinite noun phrase . Indefinite articles are those such as English " a " or "an", which do not refer to
1349-580: A specific identifiable entity. Indefinites are commonly used to introduce a new discourse referent which can be referred back to in subsequent discussion: Indefinites can also be used to generalize over entities who have some property in common: Indefinites can also be used to refer to specific entities whose precise identity is unknown or unimportant. Indefinites also have predicative uses: Indefinite noun phrases are widely studied within linguistics, in particular because of their ability to take exceptional scope . A proper article indicates that its noun
1420-497: A system include later forms of Proto-Indo-European (see below ), Sanskrit , some Germanic languages , most Slavic languages , a few Romance languages ( Romanian , Asturian and Neapolitan ), Marathi , Latin , and Greek . Here nouns that denote animate things (humans and animals) generally belong to one gender, and those that denote inanimate things to another (although there may be some deviation from that principle). Examples include earlier forms of Proto-Indo-European and
1491-527: A way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects. The same does not apply to Swedish common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. Norwegian Nynorsk , Norwegian Bokmål and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbors have lost one of the genders. As shown,
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#17328546210041562-499: Is stalas , the white table. Languages in the above table written in italics are constructed languages and are not natural, that is to say that they have been purposefully invented by an individual (or group of individuals) with some purpose in mind. When using a definite article in Tokelauan language , unlike in some languages like English, if the speaker is speaking of an item, they need not have referred to it previously as long as
1633-485: Is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter. There are also certain exceptional nouns whose gender does not follow the denoted sex, such as the German Mädchen , meaning "girl", which is neuter. This is because it is actually a diminutive of "Magd" and all diminutive forms with the suffix -chen are neuter. Examples of languages with such
1704-529: Is also found in Dravidian languages . (See below .) It has been shown that grammatical gender causes a number of cognitive effects. For example, when native speakers of gendered languages are asked to imagine an inanimate object speaking, whether its voice is male or female tends to correspond to the grammatical gender of the object in their language. This has been observed for speakers of Spanish, French, and German, among others. Caveats of this research include
1775-515: Is also possible for a given noun to be usable with any of several classifiers; for example, the Mandarin Chinese classifier 个 ( 個 ) gè is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers. Grammatical gender can be realized as inflection and can be conditioned by other types of inflection, especially number inflection, where the singular-plural contrast can interact with gender inflection. The grammatical gender of
1846-507: Is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech . In English , both "the" and "a(n)" are articles, which combine with nouns to form noun phrases. Articles typically specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun phrase, but in many languages, they carry additional grammatical information such as gender , number , and case . Articles are part of
1917-613: Is assigned to one of the genders, and few or no nouns can occur in more than one gender. Gender is considered an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words, a process called "agreement" . Nouns may be considered the "triggers" of the process, whereas other words will be the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners , pronouns , numerals , quantifiers , possessives , adjectives , past and passive participles , articles , verbs , adverbs , complementizers , and adpositions . Gender class may be marked on
1988-575: Is fulfilled by no , which can appear before a singular or plural noun: In German , the negative article is, among other variations, kein , in opposition to the indefinite article ein . The equivalent in Dutch is geen : 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
2059-418: Is masculine (meaning "lake") its genitive singular form is Sees , but when it is feminine (meaning "sea"), the genitive is See , because feminine nouns do not take the genitive -s . Gender is sometimes reflected in other ways. In Welsh , gender marking is mostly lost on nouns; however, Welsh has initial mutation , where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain conditions. Gender
2130-416: Is one of the factors that can cause one form of mutation (soft mutation). For instance, the word merch "girl" changes into ferch after the definite article . This only occurs with feminine singular nouns: mab "son" remains unchanged. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way. Additionally, in many languages, gender is often closely correlated with the basic unmodified form ( lemma ) of
2201-450: Is only partially valid, and many nouns may belong to a gender category that contrasts with their meaning, e.g. the word for "manliness" could be of feminine gender, as it is in French with "la masculinité" and "la virilité". In such a case, the gender assignment can also be influenced by the morphology or phonology of the noun, or in some cases can be apparently arbitrary. Usually each noun
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2272-437: Is proper , and refers to a unique entity. It may be the name of a person, the name of a place, the name of a planet, etc. The Māori language has the proper article a , which is used for personal nouns; so, " a Pita " means "Peter". In Māori, when the personal nouns have the definite or indefinite article as an important part of it, both articles are present; for example, the phrase " a Te Rauparaha ", which contains both
2343-415: Is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as lo bueno , lo malo ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while grammatical gender refers to certain phonetic characteristics (the sounds at the end, or beginning) of a noun. Among other lexical items, the definite article changes its form according to this categorization. In
2414-487: Is the sentence Katti, han får unger (literally, The cat, he is having kittens ). The cat is masculine in gender and so referred to as han ("he") even if it is a female cat. This article about Germanic languages is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Grammatical gender In linguistics , a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to
2485-412: Is usually used is if a large amount or a specific class of things are being described. Occasionally, such as if one was describing an entire class of things in a nonspecific fashion, the singular definite noun te would is used. In English, ‘ Ko te povi e kai mutia ’ means “ Cows eat grass ”. Because this is a general statement about cows, te is used instead of nā . The ko serves as a preposition to
2556-567: The Baltic languages , the majority of Slavic languages , the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili ). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages , the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases. Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages , Proto-Indo-European , did not have articles. Most of
2627-455: The "triggers" of the process, because they have an inherent gender, whereas related words that change their form to match the gender of the noun can be considered the "target" of these changes. These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners , pronouns , numerals , quantifiers , possessives , adjectives , past and passive participles , verbs , adverbs , complementizers , and adpositions . Gender class may be marked on
2698-427: The , or it could also translate to the English indefinite article a . An example of how the definite article te can be used as an interchangeable definite or indefinite article in the Tokelauan language would be the sentence “ Kua hau te tino ”. In the English language, this could be translated as “ A man has arrived ” or “ The man has arrived ” where using te as the article in this sentence can represent any man or
2769-520: The Basque speakers"). Speakers of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic , a modern Aramaic language that lacks a definite article, may at times use demonstratives aha and aya (feminine) or awa (masculine) – which translate to "this" and " that ", respectively – to give the sense of "the". In Indonesian , the third person possessive suffix -nya could be also used as a definite article. Indefinite articles typically arise from adjectives meaning one . For example,
2840-461: 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
2911-486: The articles are suffixed, has столот ( stolot ), the chair; столов ( stolov ), this chair; and столон ( stolon ), that chair. These derive from the Proto-Slavic demonstratives *tъ "this, that", *ovъ "this here" and *onъ "that over there, yonder" respectively. Colognian prepositions articles such as in dat Auto , or et Auto , the car; the first being specifically selected, focused, newly introduced, while
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2982-400: The circumstances in which it occurs, and the way words are marked for gender vary between languages. Gender inflection may interact with other grammatical categories like number or case . In some languages the declension pattern followed by the noun itself will be different for different genders. The gender of a noun may affect the modifications that the noun itself undergoes, particularly
3053-582: The colloquial use of definite articles with personal names, though widespread, is considered to be a Germanism . The definite article sometimes appears in American English nicknames such as "the Donald", referring to former president Donald Trump , and "the Gipper", referring to former president Ronald Reagan . A partitive article is a type of article, sometimes viewed as a type of indefinite article, used with
3124-439: The default definite article, whereas the proximal form (with infix -o- , derived from the proximal demonstrative hau-/hon- ) is marked and indicates some kind of (spatial or otherwise) close relationship between the speaker and the referent (e.g., it may imply that the speaker is included in the referent): etxeak ("the houses") vs. etxeok ("these houses [of ours]"), euskaldunak ("the Basque speakers") vs. euskaldunok ("we,
3195-773: 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. Many languages do not use articles at all, and may use other ways of indicating old versus new information, such as topic–comment constructions. Plural: -ene, -ne (all suffixes) एउटा , एउटी , एक , अनेक , कुनै Plural: -ene, -a (all suffixes) Plural: -ane, -ene, -a (all suffixes) Plural: -na, -a, -en (all suffixes) The following examples show articles which are always suffixed to
3266-450: 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. Definite articles typically arise from demonstratives meaning that . For example,
3337-511: The definite articles in most Romance languages —e.g., el , il , le , la , lo, a, o — derive from the Latin demonstratives ille (masculine), illa (feminine) and illud (neuter). 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
3408-782: The earliest family known to have split off from it, the extinct Anatolian languages (see below ). Modern examples include Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe . Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called common gender ), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include Danish and Swedish (see Gender in Danish and Swedish ), and to some extent Dutch (see Gender in Dutch grammar ). The dialect of
3479-481: The effect for German speakers has also led to a proposal that the effect is restricted to languages with a two-gender system, possibly because such languages are inclined towards a greater correspondence between grammatical and natural gender. Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language. For example, one study found that German speakers describing
3550-532: The existence of words that denote male and female, such as the difference between "aunt" and "uncle" is not enough to constitute a gender system. In other languages, the division into genders usually correlates to some degree, at least for a certain set of nouns, such as those denoting humans, with some property or properties of the things that particular nouns denote. Such properties include animacy or inanimacy, " humanness " or non-humanness, and biological sex . However, in most languages, this semantic division
3621-521: 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 , for example transforming
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#17328546210043692-515: The inflections in a language relate to sex or gender . According to one estimate, gender is used in approximately half of the world's languages . According to one definition: "Genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words." Languages with grammatical gender usually have two to four different genders, but some are attested with up to 20. Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. Depending on
3763-401: The item is specific. This is also true when it comes to the reference of a specific person. So, although the definite article used to describe a noun in the Tokelauan language is te , it can also translate to the indefinite article in languages that requires the item being spoken of to have been referenced prior. When translating to English, te could translate to the English definite article
3834-439: The language and the word, this assignment might bear some relationship with the meaning of the noun (e.g. "woman" is usually feminine), or may be arbitrary. In a few languages, the assignment of any particular noun (i.e., nominal lexeme, that set of noun forms inflectable from a common lemma) to one grammatical gender is solely determined by that noun's meaning, or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy. However,
3905-494: The languages in this family do not have definite or indefinite articles: there is no article in Latin or Sanskrit , nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the families of Slavic languages (except for Bulgarian and Macedonian , which are rather distinctive among the Slavic languages in their grammar, and some Northern Russian dialects ), Baltic languages and many Indo-Aryan languages . Although Classical Greek had
3976-407: The latter is not selected, unfocused, already known, general, or generic. Standard Basque distinguishes between proximal and distal definite articles in the plural (dialectally, a proximal singular and an additional medial grade may also be present). The Basque distal form (with infix -a- , etymologically a suffixed and phonetically reduced form of the distal demonstrative har-/hai- ) functions as
4047-747: The merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European (see below ). Some gender contrasts are referred to as classes ; for some examples, see Noun class . In some of the Slavic languages , for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in Polish , also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans. (For details, see below .) A human–non-human (or "rational–non-rational") distinction
4118-438: The noun itself, but can also be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. As an example, we consider Spanish , a language with two gender categories: "natural" vs "grammatical". "Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender
4189-1022: The noun itself, but will also always be marked on other constituents in a noun phrase or sentence. If the noun is explicitly marked, both trigger and target may feature similar alternations. Three possible functions of grammatical gender include: Moreover, grammatical gender may serve to distinguish homophones. It is a quite common phenomenon in language development for two phonemes to merge, thereby making etymologically distinct words sound alike. In languages with gender distinction, however, these word pairs may still be distinguishable by their gender. For example, French pot ("pot") and peau ("skin") are homophones /po/ , but disagree in gender: le pot vs. la peau . Common systems of gender contrast include: Nouns that denote specifically male persons (or animals) are normally of masculine gender; those that denote specifically female persons (or animals) are normally of feminine gender; and nouns that denote something that does not have any sex, or do not specify
4260-455: The noun, and sometimes a noun can be modified to produce (for example) masculine and feminine words of similar meaning. See § Form-based morphological criteria , below. Agreement , or concord, is a grammatical process in which certain words change their form so that values of certain grammatical categories match those of related words. Gender is one of the categories which frequently require agreement. In this case, nouns may be considered
4331-604: The noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as piece(s) and head in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of East Asian languages , where it is common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three classifier people". A more general type of classifier ( classifier handshapes ) can be found in sign languages . Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that
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#17328546210044402-414: The noun: Examples of prefixed definite articles: A different way, limited to the definite article, is used by Latvian and Lithuanian . The noun does not change but the adjective can be defined or undefined. In Latvian: galds , a table / the table; balt s galds , a white table; balt ais galds , the white table. In Lithuanian: stalas , a table / the table; balt as stalas , a white table; baltas
4473-551: The old Norwegian capital Bergen also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in Norwegian Bokmål . This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in
4544-458: The possibility of subjects' "using grammatical gender as a strategy for performing the task", and the fact that even for inanimate objects the gender of nouns is not always random. For example, in Spanish, female gender is often attributed to objects that are "used by women, natural, round, or light" and male gender to objects "used by men, artificial, angular, or heavy." Apparent failures to reproduce
4615-527: The proper article a and the definite article Te refers to the person name Te Rauparaha . The definite article is sometimes also used with proper names, which are already specified by definition (there is just one of them). For example: the Amazon, the Hebrides . In these cases, the definite article may be considered superfluous. Its presence can be accounted for by the assumption that they are shorthand for
4686-497: The real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender . The values present in a given language, of which there are usually two or three, are called the genders of that language. Whereas some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", others use different definitions for each. Many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of
4757-515: The sex of their referent, have come to belong to one or other of the genders, in a way that may appear arbitrary. Examples of languages with such a system include most of the modern Romance languages , the Baltic languages , the Celtic languages , some Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Hindi ), and the Afroasiatic languages . This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there
4828-509: The singular, the article is: el (masculine), and la (feminine). Thus, in "natural gender", nouns referring to sexed beings who are male beings carry the masculine article, and female beings the feminine article (agreement). el the. MASC . SG abuelo grandfather el abuelo the.MASC.SG grandfather "the grandfather" la the. FEM . SG abuela grandmother la abuela the.FEM.SG grandmother Article (grammar) In grammar , an article
4899-606: The speaker has already mentioned, or it may be otherwise something uniquely specified. For example, Sentence 1 uses the definite article and thus, expresses a request for a particular book. In contrast, Sentence 2 uses an indefinite article and thus, conveys that the speaker would be satisfied with any book. The definite article can also be used in English to indicate a specific class among other classes: However, recent developments show that definite articles are morphological elements linked to certain noun types due to lexicalization . Under this point of view, definiteness does not play
4970-407: The way in which the noun inflects for number and case . For example, a language like Latin , German or Russian has a number of different declension patterns, and which pattern a particular noun follows may be highly correlated with its gender. For some instances of this, see Latin declension . A concrete example is provided by the German word See , which has two possible genders: when it
5041-557: The “ te ” The article ni is used for describing a plural indefinite noun. ‘ E i ei ni tuhi? ’ translates to “ Are there any books? ” Articles often develop by specialization of adjectives or determiners . Their development is often a sign of languages becoming more analytic instead of synthetic , perhaps combined with the loss of inflection as in English, Romance languages, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Torlakian. Joseph Greenberg in Universals of Human Language describes "the cycle of
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