Der/Die/Das

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The topic lists the German definite articles, masculine, feminine and neuter, in that order. Being rather fluent in German, I do know the purpose of these words. But from the point of view of my first language they are some queer extra baggage. They add no extra information to the words they are attached to. Russian is another language with this triplet of gender but without articles. English is a language with articles but without a real grammatical gender. Finnish has neither.

Question: Those of you who are native English speakers, how do you see the word the? If all the the's suddenly disappeared, English would still be comprehensible.

A Russian friend of mine once said to me that Finnish is a formidable language, just words after words, no gender with them. It seems to me that some languages have an inbuilt property to tell more than can be found in the words themselves.

As you say, English would be, and is, quite comprehensible without the use of articles. But it tends to sound very strange indeed to a native speaker, when spoken that way. The key element of "Broken English" is the absence of articles, and most people would probably use that term even if the speaker otherwise had a good English vocabulary.

My impression is that languages tend to develop or evolve a definite article in some cases, though evidently not in others.

In Latin, for example, Canis in area latrat can mean: "The dog is barking in the yard" or "A dog is barking in the yard", depending on the context. When I began studying Latin at the age of 12, I only found this strange for a very short while, and adapted easily to the "system". My experience in teaching the language was that the vast majority of students do likewise.

When the Romance Languages developed from Late Latin, so too did a definite article. In French le and la derive from the Latin ille and illa, the masculine and feminine forms of the word for "that". Hence Latin ille canis (="that dog") > French le chien (= "the dog"). It's interesting that the French words for "he" and "she" (il and elle) also come from ille and illa (= "that man" and "that woman").

Ancient Greek had a similar development, whereby the word which originally meant "he/she/it" or "this/that" later came to mean "the".

I would imagine that since English and German originate from the same Indo-European language as Latin and Greek, then they also presumably had no definite articles in an earlier form, though I do not know how they developed one. As you say though, some languages have always managed perfectly well without articles whether Indo-European in origin (like Russian) or not. Am I correct in thinking that Finnish does not have an Indo-European origin? In which case, what family of languages is it related to?

All European languages of Indo European origin (that leaves out Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, and few others) have gender. in all of the Germanic languages, the Romance languages, the Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic languages, and Albanian, and Greek, you have to worry about the sexual gender of inanimate objects and of abstract concepts. Or thats my understanding.

Except English! English is a European Germanic language of Indo European origin. But we dropped that gender nonsense centuries ago. THANK GAWD!

The Slavic languages very much have gender, but they all economized a different way- they all drop the articles (like 'a', and 'the') etc.

As a result immigrants to America from slavic speaking countries in eastern Europe (like stereotyped Russian characters like Boris Badenoff, and a real Serbian woman I met once) all drop the articles in English when they speak english just as they would do in their native tongue. Its one of the defining features of the vaudeville Russian-American, or Slavic-American dialect.

And...you have no trouble understanding what they are saying in their dialect.

Since Americans have no trouble understanding Boris Badenoff in Bullwinkle it does make you wonder why we bother with "the" and "this" and "a".

But then - in writing this very post- I find it impossible NOT to use the and this and that.

So I dunno.

I'll have to get back to you about it. Its a bit mind warping.

The idea of giving inanimate objects has always boggled me. Is it a matter of personification (such as when cars are refered to as "she")?

Mark Twain quipped that in German "a young woman has no sex. But a turnip does have a sex!"

Its probably a legacy of the neolithic. The invading tribes that brought Indoeuropean languages to Europe probably all stemmed from a single tribe of animistic spirit worshipers who thought objects had spirts with personalities and genders. So you had to address them properly. Or thats my guess.

You probably can make anything have any ?sex? by naming it with a synonymous expression.

This seeming arbitrariness can go a little further:

Many non european languages have what linguists call "gender". But not always sexual genders. Ive read about another African language that divides nouns into gender by whether the nouns denote flat objects, or round objects, and something else. All kinds of divisions get created that force speakers to worry about "agreement" of adjectives and so forth.

My native tongue has no articles at all but it does have masculine/feminine/neutral grammatical genders. I wonder how you, native speakers, feel about the fact of English not having those - everything is just "it" - we, Poles refer to all nouns as to "him", "her" or "it", whether they have an actual sexual gender being living beings with a defined sex or not. Like: it's obvious that a man is a he or a woman is a she but for us a car is a he, while a spoon is always a she and an eye for example is "it". Brains are masculine, livers are feminine, the same is for legs and hands but an arm is already neutral. A squirrel is always a woman, regardless of whether it's a male or female. I would say in Polish: I saw a squirrel and I think she had a beautiful tail. Or: I ate this sausage and I liked her so much that I think I'll buy her once more. Nouns like sleigh or door are feminine, too but they are ALWAYS plural - "Open the door". "I can't open them, there's something wrong with the locker" - even if you refer to a single door.

You wonder: How did sausages become feminine, yet eyes became gender-neutral?

You would think, through the shape of a sausage, that it would become masculine.

One would think that eyes, being a prominent feature of women (because of makeup), would become feminine.

Language is a funny thing.

No idea how it works but for a sausage - that was indeed true

In languages with no article, how do people differentiate between "the house", "a house" and "no house"?

There are languages in which the difference between the house and a house is made by inflecting the word for house. In others, you use different words to disambiguate?the same kinds of words which tend to evolve into articles, like demonstratives, numerals and indefinites.

I don?t think there?s any simplicity to gain by removing articles. At most, you can drop either the or a/an, using instead the bare noun: the house (definite) vs house (indefinite), or house (definite) vs a house (indefinite). Even this can arguably come at the cost of obscuring somewhat the difference between mass and count nouns, and between proper and common nouns. For example, the second option would force you to always say a water, a meat, a sand or a hope unless you meant the water, the meat, etc. The first option would entail either saying the Alice or the Bob every time you don?t mean an Alice or a Bob, or making an exception for proper nouns, which, in turn, would mean you need some workaround when you do want to say an Alice or a Bob.

You just know it from the context. When I started to learn English, I always found it strange that there may be any sort of article standing before the word "house" - you just should know it from the very context, I thought. After all, there aren't many situations, in which you can't differentiate between those two sorts of houses - when you are phoning someone, for example, and this other person is asking you where you are, it's obvious that you mean your own house (and if you don't mean your own one, you just say from whose house you are calling - "I'm in Alison's house", "I'm in grandpa's house" etc.). Or, if it was raining when you were outside, far from your own house and someone is asking you later on, whether you got soaked a lot, knowing you weren't at home then, you just can answer to this question:" No, not at all, I was not outside but in a house - you know, I found some abandoned ruined building no one lives in/I was in a house, for I recalled that Tyler lives close to the place I was then at, so I dropped in" - you know, you just precise then in what house you were and that's all.

Don't some language have "inflections," which replace the definite/indefinite article?