A question I’ve been pondering for a while: Where did the Romance languages get their articles? They all have ‘em, but Latin, the mother-tongue of the Romance family, emphatically does not. Are they imports from the Germanic languages, brought in during the barbarian invasions? Are they hold-overs from the earlier Celtic languages spoken in France, Spain and Northern Italy? Were they given to them by the same alien race that built the pyramids?
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I seem to recall reading or hearing that Latin’s demonstrative pronoun ille, illa, illud (that) was the source for Romance language definite articles. ille becomes il, el, le, illa becomes la. The number one (unus, -a, -um) turned into the indefinite article (e.g., un, une in French).
Perhaps the newly-Latin-speaking barbarians were accustomed to articles in their own languages and appropriated ille and unus to fill the gap.
Thanks, Michael. That was kind of what I figured. I wonder what other syntactic cross-pollination happened between Latin and the barbarian tongues.
Probably same source as “uh,” and “like.”
As in “chercher le . e . e . e . e, er, mot juste.”