The history of the am- definite article – South Arabian or Arabic?

2021 ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Al-Jallad
Keyword(s):  
Definite Article ◽  
History Of

Determiners and the deictic system

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-248
Author(s):  
Martin Maiden ◽  
Adina Dragomirescu ◽  
Gabriela Pană Dindelegan ◽  
Oana Uță Bărbulescu ◽  
Rodica Zafiu
Keyword(s):  
Definite Article ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
System P ◽  
History Of

How did the definite article evolve morphologically from Latin ILLE? What is the determiner al and how did it evolve? What is the history of the indefinite article? How does locative and adverbial deixis work? What is the function of the formatives -a, -le, and -și?

Literary Debt

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1480-1488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Book Production ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ENLIGHTENMENT: A VIEW OF THEIR HISTORY

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. POCOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Single Root ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Single Process ◽  
History Of

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us.

IV.—Grammatical and Natural Gender in Middle English

PMLA ◽  
1921 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
History Of

The scholars who have investigated the history of gender in Middle English have been unanimous in the conclusion that the loss of grammatical gender was the result of the loss of the gender-distinctive forms of the strong adjective declension, the definite article and demonstrative, and other pronominal words. Körner wrote in 1888 : Die angelsächsische sprache unterschied bekanntlich drei grammatische genera, während das moderne englisch das grammatische geschlecht überhaupt nicht mehr besitzt. Der verlust desselben hängt natürlich mit dem verluste der flexion aufs engste zusammen und findet auch hierin seine alleinige erklärung. Bot doch die flexion allein dem sprechenden einen anhalt für die unterscheidung des grammatischen geschlechts; woran hätte man sich sonst noch halten können, als erstere aufgegeben wurde? Denn der zusammenhang zwischen der bedeutung und dem überkommenen geschlecht der bezeichnungen für leblose wesen wurde längst nicht mehr gefühlt. Als daher durch aufgabe der flexion das äussere erkennungszeichen für das grammatische genus fiel, so musste letzteres überhaupt schwinden. Es ergab sich von selbst, dass an seine stelle das natürliche gechlecht trat.1

Postscript

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Heterogeneous Systems ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Electricity And Magnetism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Scientific Achievements

As I have worked on this book, I have often been struck by the audacity of its title. The phrase “the New Mechanical Philosophy” was not my own, but still, to appropriate the venerable tradition of mechanical philosophy, to call it new, and to add a definite article to boot—maybe that’s just too much. Nonetheless I have stuck with the title, and the project, because I think it reflects both the continuity with the history of science and its philosophy, and a sea change in philosophical thinking in the new century. Mechanical philosophy is as old as Democritus; it was a central theme in the scientific revolution; it has helped drive research and debates on the nature of life and the nature of mind. But the New Mechanical Philosophy is new in large part because it tracks changes in the way science is done. Over recent decades, the sciences have developed increasing, if still rudimentary, capacities to analyze complex and heterogeneous systems—cells, brains, ecosystems, economies, and so on. Whereas in earlier epochs many of the greatest scientific achievements have been to understand the basic building blocks—the laws of electricity and magnetism or the structure of the hydrogen atom—scientists are now able to greater and greater extents understand how these things are put together to make the universe we know. Mechanical philosophy is always about understanding how things are put together, so it is a philosophy for this time....

Nemara and Faw

1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. F. L. Beeston
Keyword(s):  
International Symposium ◽  
The Other ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
Trade Route ◽  
The Many

The many thousands of inscriptions conventionally classified under the headings of Dedanite, Lihyanite, Safaitic, and Thamudic, all share the characteristic of a definite article in the form h- or hn-. Pre-Islamic texts displaying the distinctively Arabic article al are a mere handful; among them, easily the most important is the funerary text of Umru' al-Qays at Nemara (RES 483). This very minuscule corpus has recently been enlarged by two inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (anciently Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil; near modern Sulayyil, on the trade route linking Nagrān with the eastern Arabian coast), publicized by Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Ansary in spring 1977 at the first International Symposium on Studies in the History of Arabia at Riyadh. These texts are particularly welcome in that they are written in fine monumental South Arabian script, and thus do not pose the acute problems of reading occasioned by the exceedingly ambiguous scripts of Nemara and the other northern texts.

On the history of definiteness marking in Scandinavian

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAN TERJE FAARLUND
Keyword(s):  
Typical Case ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Free Word

The definite article in many European languages has its origin in a demonstrative or a pronoun. The development into a definite article is a typical case of grammaticalization. In this article I will demonstrate that this kind of grammaticalization, like all kinds of grammaticalization, can be explained as a case of reduction through reanalysis at acquisition. In addition to the prenominal definite article shared with other Germanic languages, the Scandinavian languages also have a postposed definite article. In Old Norse the postnominal definite article is a clitic merged as a head in D, while in its modern descendent Norwegian it is an inflectional suffix checking a grammatical feature in the Infl domain, expressing definiteness within the DP according to general principles of agreement. Thus, so-called ‘double definiteness’ (den gamle hesten‘the old horse.def’) has become possible as an agreement phenomenon. In Old Norse, the clitic cannot trigger definiteness agreement. This change from a clitic to an inflectional suffix is obviously a case of grammaticalization, but it has wider implications than just the change of morphosyntactic status. ON is shown to have had two projections in the D domain (þau in stóru skip‘those the large ships’). Later the independent definite articleinnwas lost and replaced by the demonstrativeþann>den. As a result (or cause?) its projection was lost, and the postposed article was left without a free-word counterpart. This, combined with phonological reduction and semantic bleaching, reduced it to an inflectional suffix.

The growing distance between proper names and common nouns in German: On the way to onymic schema constancy

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Damaris Nübling
Keyword(s):  
Proper Names ◽  
Specific Treatment ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
History Of ◽  
Linguistic Units

AbstractThe aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, it shows that the history of German proper name inflection is a story of profound change. Proper names started out being inflected like common nouns; later, the reduction of their inflectional endings eventually resulted in a distinct declension class of proper names. Furthermore, gender assignment in proper names is different from that of common nouns, and today proper names may be accompanied by classifiers that have evolved from the definite article. Additionally, proper names show particularities concerning their syntactical behavior, word-formation processes, and orthography. While (most of) these developments provide evidence for change, they can, at the same time, be functionally interpreted as strategies to preserve the name shape for reasons of recognition. A second aim of this article is therefore to show that, as proper names are specific linguistic units, they deserve specific treatment. Most of the changes serve to stabilize the “name body” (schema consistency) and to mark morphological boundaries.

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