It seems that many of us Mona, Annika, Patricia, Llama have
something to add to the article usages in German and English or even
Norwegian. Heres something very odd again:
In front of antique or biblical names when the name is in genitive form,
you can often read des, e.g. "das Evangelium des Mattheus, Geburt
des Johannes, die Schriften des Plato, das Augenpaar des Odysseus"
(the latter is from the Das Schweigen des Sirenen, thanks to Llama for
the text to me, unintendedly letting me to find an another strange form
of article usage in German. But these name do not come with an article
when in nom. form.
This type of usage of the definite article as it comes only with antique
names is archaic.
To Patricia,
>Considered uneducated, !!! why on Earth - I wonder
I didnt mean to say that definite article before a personal name is
completely wrong and must be fought by all means;-) The -->general
view is that it is uneducated.
I wonder if ON also had a slang, or is slang just a phenomenon of the
modern city life? Or to say something odd slang is called dialect until it
is spoken in unurbanized society.
To Annika,
>This all leads me to think of a tie to a sense of posession,
belongingness. And come to think >of it, if I was to tell you why I was
>late for a meeting, and during this said '-and when I got >into the
>car...', I think you would assume it was my own car, or at least a car I
>had general >access to.
Definitely, the definite article normally has the function to indicate that
we are talking about a very specific thing, not in general. May be youre
right about that possession-feeling when talking about a family
member or a friend. But may be it also has the same function as before
ordinary nouns, i.e. to refer a certain John or a certain Jill. (That Jill, you
know and not someone else who is also Jill, etc.)
---
On the other hand, there is a very odd usage of indefinite article before
a persons name in English, e.g. The phone is ringing and I lift up the
receiver and answer the call, and someone called Mrs. Jones tells me
that she wants to speak to my brother. - Theres a Mrs Jones for
you. I would say to my brother. (This means that someone, whom I
dont know and never have met before is called Mrs. Jones, so I refer to
her as a Mrs. Jones.). When I imagine this conversation in German, I
would say Eine gewisse Frau Schneider will mit dir sprechen. So in
the German certain (gewisser, gewisse) is used, while the English
tends to use an indefinite article.
To make more remarks on the articles, in Finnish there are no articles
at all, but there are other fine ways to make it clear that one is talking
in general or on a specific thing. One of this is the pronoun se, which
directly corresponds to the English it, (not this not that but it.)
E.g. SE ihminen halua puhua sinun kanssa., i.e. IT man wants to talk
to you, though in Finnish we could also say tämä ihminen (this man)
or tuo ihminen (that man). So all that in one word, se behaves
sometimes like a definite article, though there isnt such a one in
Finnish. This may show that the definite article may be developed from
a pronoun. To support this argument, I can give an example from
Hungarian, the definite article (az) is the same as the demonstrative
pronoun (az meaning that).
Anyway enough for today about articles;-)
Imre