Re: Articles


António Marques wrote:
Joachim Pense wrote:
Am 22 Dec 2006 21:40:30 -0800 schrieb mb:

Romance usage of the article is mostly uniform (though not completely),
and doesn't remind me especially of greek, except perhaps in the
romanian case.
That would be the last one to compare it to, being a suffixed rather
than prefixed "illu".
By remind, I mean its usage - in what circumstances is it needed, what
differences in meaning does it carry when a similar sentence without
article is possible, etc -, not where it appears in the sentence.
How's that? If there is some major deviation in the use of the article
in Greek as outside the mainstream range of Romance I must have missed
it.
Provided, of course, that we are not talking about the Greek of 2,000
years ago.

I certainly am.

So was I, post-600 AD greek is certainly not relevant.

How's that? Why not? On the contrary, if you want to look at
parallelism you sure should look at the development.

After all, Greek was the first IE language to develop
an article (of which I know). Do you see major differences in usage?

I didn't say there were major differences, I said there were some:

1) In greek, the article may freely precede any name.

It generally must rather than may.

In romance the
article can't used with person names formally addressed (romanian being
the possible exception), and this is a very significative feature, not
just a syntactical quirk.

Depends what Romance exactly. Galloromans of Italy and some languages
of France have an obligatory article before person nouns.

2) In greek, the article may be used as pronoun. In romance it can't
(marginally, dialectally, it may be possible).

That was 2,000 years ago. Gone. Dead.

3) In greek, the article may sometimes be used as a relative pronoun. It
can't in romance - though this may have more to do with romance having
mostly lost cases.

Same: Gone.

Surely, in classical Greek the placement of the attribute (either
between article and noun or after the noun) makes a difference, but I
am not so sure if this is very relevant here.

Bella la frase.
Again, Romance use is not uniform.

Romanian -ul/-a is just the same in origin and feel as lo/a in the other
languages (but see 1), it just happens to be postposed, which is
actually a good place for a latin demonstrative (cf. in diebus illis ~
in illis diebus). I don't see that whether the article is pre- or
postposed is of any importance (and hence, I don't think there's any
reason romanian should be the last to compare greek to).

Just because it is postposed --typically Latin feature.

.

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