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Classical Latin, as I understand things, barely has a definite article at all: ille is the nearest equivalent, and even this word is closer to English that than the. But Spanish, French and Italian are chock full of el/le/il/etc. What on earth could cause a language, even over the course of centuries, to undergo such a drastic structural change?

Tom Hosker
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    The presence or definite and indefinite article is, together with other characteristics, a trait of the Standard Average European sprachbund, which encompasses all the Romance languages but not Latin, but also Germanic languages like English, and other languages (some slavic, hungarian, etc.). It seems to be the result of heavy language contacts during the migration period, at the end of the 1st millenium. – Frédéric Grosshans Oct 14 '19 at 13:33
  • @FrédéricGrosshans. The Sprachbund hypothesis does not explain why in (for example) Romanian the article appears not as a prefix, but as a suffix. – fdb Oct 14 '19 at 13:51
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    @fdb : This is weel explained by Romanian being part of the Balkanic Sprachbund, a stronger Sprachbund within Standard average European – Frédéric Grosshans Oct 14 '19 at 13:57
  • Languages can undergo extremely drastic structural changes "over the course of centuries", especially when there's political instability and the spoken language begins to take on a life of its own compared to the written language. The Romance languages developed all sort of extremely drastic structural changes during that time, although a few were probably already present when Vulgar Latin could still be considered a single language; in fact, isn't the fact that, say, French is so drastically different from Romanian in a number of ways evidence of that? – LjL Oct 14 '19 at 14:14
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    Consider that contemporary colloquial Slovak is well on the way of transforming demonstrative pronouns into definite articles - not a drastic change at all (of course, this being modern times, the trend is supressed by widespread literacy, education and the pressure to use the "proper" language). – Radovan Garabík Oct 15 '19 at 14:39
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    The rise of articles seems to be one result of the loss of inflectional affixes. When morphology fails, syntax enters, and it brings with it lots of little particles (prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, etc.) that do for syntax what paradigms did for morphology. Except syntax isn't paradigmatic; it's much messier and leaves artifacts all over the place. – jlawler Oct 16 '19 at 20:37
  • Because most people didn't really speak Classical Latin in their day-to-day business. Classical Latin was mostly for writing things down. – crobar Oct 17 '19 at 09:28
  • I'd answer "Semitic languages could influence such a drastic change", but I really don't know at all. – vectory Oct 17 '19 at 17:07
  • Latin did use definite articles, they used demonstrative, when there was a need. Analyzing the evolution of old French for instance, shows the progressive rise of articles. – Quidam Nov 12 '19 at 00:06
  • I always thought that the romance definite articles came from Arabic "al-", never did it come to me that it could be from Latin "ille". – Quintus Caesius - RM Sep 18 '21 at 11:20

5 Answers5

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Languages evolve in many ways! Proto-Indo-European had no articles at all, but they evolved independently in several different branches: you can still see the similarity between English "the" and "that", which is almost exactly the same as how ille turned into el/il/etc.

It looks a bit more likely, too, when you realize this evolution only had to happen once in Romance. This semantic bleaching started in Vulgar Latin around the first few centuries CE; it was well-established by the time Vulgar Latin started splitting into the ancestors of French and Spanish and Italian and the like. So they all inherited it from the same source, rather than all having to develop it independently.

Draconis
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    'Proto-Indo-European had no articles at all'. That's fascinating. Forgive my scepticism, but how can we know that a reconstructed language lacked certain features? I have a rough idea how we might reconstruct this or that word, but reconstructing the absence of a word is almost a contradiction in terms. Please convince me otherwise! – Tom Hosker Oct 14 '19 at 19:29
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    @TomHosker Basically, all the oldest IE languages that have articles seem to have developed them from different sources. If PIE had articles, we'd expect its descendants to all have articles from the same source—but that's not what we see. Instead, Romance made them one way, Germanic made them another way, Hellenic made them a different way, etc. – Draconis Oct 14 '19 at 19:32
  • @Draconis — did the Romance, Germanic, and Hellenic article develop independently? It seems kind of a coincidence that there are adjacent areas speaking those languages, literally in walking distance of each other, while whole continents seem to lack articles. – Michael Lorton Oct 15 '19 at 03:31
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    @Malvolio Some part of it may be areal/Sprachbund features, especially in modern times. But the Germanic and Hellenic ones were definitely independent; the Romance one might have influenced Germanic, but was etymologically separate. – Draconis Oct 15 '19 at 03:41
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    Intriguing! If multiple cultures invented articles independetly, then articles had to fulfill some purpose, but what was it? I mean, there are so many languages that are completely fine going without articles. How come they were invented in the first place? (Next question would be when) – Imago Oct 15 '19 at 18:20
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    @Imago "Why" is always hard to answer in linguistics, but "what purpose do articles serve" would make a good question of its own—the explanation is too long to fit in a single comment. – Draconis Oct 15 '19 at 18:22
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    @Draconis, there already seems to be a discussion about that: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29059/understanding-the-purpose-of-determiners-articles-demonstratives-in-language – Imago Oct 15 '19 at 18:23
  • @Malvolio Also note that there where people speaking other languages, possibly filling the gaps between those speakers. The finnish-hungarian languages where most likely part of a continuum crossing the continent before those horse barbarians showed up with their new language. – Yakk - Adam Nevraumont Oct 15 '19 at 18:57
  • @Draconis... over in the question referenced by Imago you say in a comment "I can tell you all about Latin"... but you don't actually do so ... :) Any chance you might (e.g. answer that question with special reference to Latin?). I find the question truly interesting, and wonder whether it is to do with the general Decline and Fall of the empire, too many barbarians fudging case endings, etc. ..? – mike rodent Oct 16 '19 at 10:31
  • @Imago Ah, so there is! I didn't remember that one. – Draconis Oct 16 '19 at 12:49
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    @mikerodent The full details there are also too long for a comment, unfortunately, but the biggest thing was phonological changes making the case endings useless. The second declension us/ī/ō/um/ō turned into o/ī/o/o/o (in some dialects at least—French preserved the nominative longer than Italian for example) which was no longer particularly helpful. So people started using prepositions more (ad replaced dative, dē replaced genitive, etc) and eventually the cases were lost entirely. – Draconis Oct 16 '19 at 12:53
  • @Draconis Thanks. Then the question becomes "what is the purpose of phonological changes?" of course. I emphasise at this point that I'm not an (academic) linguist. I speculate that speakers of "high" Latin must have had a more leisurely, or more ponderous, more precise way of speaking, giving them time to emphasise the endings of words (where the cases happen in most languages). And then barbarians (naturalised Romans) or maybe the Romans themselves imposed a more slapdash way of speaking ... (?). Well, I must look it all up. Any links you might suggest? – mike rodent Oct 16 '19 at 13:01
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    @mikerodent Oh, you'd be surprised: the Vulgar Latin spoken on the streets of Rome in the first couple centuries AD was significantly closer to Proto-Romance than it was to Cicero's oratory. It was out in Gaul that the case distinctions actually held up the longest! But, another super short answer: phonological change has no purpose, it just sort of happens over time. If you have more questions about the evolution of Latin specifically, feel free to ask at Latin.SE, where there are more Latin specialists. – Draconis Oct 16 '19 at 13:05
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    @mikerodent Phonological change has no purpose; it's not something that happens on purpose, any more than a hurricane is. It's a lot slower, though; generally phonological change is just perceptible in one lifetime, if it's a long life. Glaciers are faster these days. – jlawler Oct 16 '19 at 20:33
  • @Draconis: A minor nit, but the Germanic languages found two different ways to have definite articles; the Western branch uses derivatives from the words for this or that, whereas the Northern branch uses suffixes whose derivation is something I haven't studied. – EvilSnack Oct 17 '19 at 04:12
  • @Draconis In fact you could say evolution has no purpose, it just happens. – CJ Dennis Oct 17 '19 at 04:45
  • @EvilSnack Very good point! I'd completely forgotten about the Norse definite suffix. Do you happen to know off the top of your head what Gothic does, if anything? – Draconis Oct 17 '19 at 05:12
  • 'Fraid not. The Wikipedia page (by which consultation I confess that I have no expertise) is not as clear as one might hope. – EvilSnack Oct 17 '19 at 11:42
  • @EvilSnack Fair enough; I'll either ask a question about it later, or dig out my old grammar of Gothic, or both. We'll see. – Draconis Oct 17 '19 at 14:28
  • Draconis' comments have no purpose, it just sort of happens over time – vectory Oct 17 '19 at 17:12
  • @vectory the indefinite (I assume you didn't mean infinitive) article in Swedish is either en (common) or ett (neuter), and it is not a suffix; only the definite article is (-en or -et, although there are also standalone definite articles den and det, doubling as demonstratives). Other Scandinavian languages are similar, with the addition of a masculine/feminine distinction in some dialects. I can't say about Icelandic and Faroese. – LjL Oct 20 '19 at 15:25
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    This answer is not developed enough, with examples IMHO – Quidam Nov 12 '19 at 00:08
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such a drastic structural change

The change is not drastic at all! It is a simple case of semantic bleaching (this is where the meaning of a word gets weaker. So you can kind of see how the is a "weaker version" of that).

Also it's not a structural change, since wherever ille and all its forms may be used, it's the same whether it was early on and meant that or it was later on and it meant the.

This had already happened in Late Latin. By that time, ille was pretty close to meaning the.

Omar and Lorraine
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    I suppose "drastic" is in the eye of the beholder, but it feels like a big change to me! Imagine if you put a copy of Don Quixote in front of Virgil or Propertius. Most of the vocabulary, and pretty much all of the grammatical structure, he could work out very quickly. But this strange word el, which occurs more frequently than any one word in Latin, would keep him guessing for a fair while, no? – Tom Hosker Oct 14 '19 at 18:36
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    @TomHosker Honestly, I think Vergil would probably recognize el — he'd just recognize it as a stigmatized form that you would never use in proper literature and poetry! (I'm not sure quite when ille started getting bleached in Vulgar Latin, but it's attested within the first few centuries, so it was probably starting to happen by his time.) – Draconis Oct 14 '19 at 19:10
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    I don't know how much Greek Virgil (in particular) knew, but some educated Romans did know Greek, and Greek had articles in classical times. – Colin Fine Oct 14 '19 at 20:24
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    @ColinFine Also a good point. Vergil loved the Homeric epics, so presumably he knew some Greek. – Draconis Oct 14 '19 at 20:35
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    @TomHosker It probably wouldn't keep Virgil guessing much longer than for modern English speaker to understand book with articles removed. – Théophile Oct 15 '19 at 14:31
  • @Théophile Loonie-speak! Moon is Harsh Mistress. – hobbs Oct 16 '19 at 16:11
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    I would think the lack of case endings and semi-fixed word order might prove a challenge for someone like Virgil. – eques Oct 17 '19 at 14:21
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I agree with the earlier answers, but they essentially state that it was a possible occurrence and how it happened (ille, illa), not why it happened.

Could it be (I am only venturing a hypothesis), that there was an influence of another language, typically Greek?

While "standard" Italian has these forms:

il vicolo

la casa

(the street, the house)

Naples and other Southern regions have:

o vico

a casa

which is suprisingly close to Ancient Greek "hos" and "he" (with the Dorian variation of the eta into alpha). Furthermore, those articles "o" an "a" have a glottal attack that may resemble the Ancient Greek prononciation.

Could it be that, e.g. native Greek speakers, e.g. from the military or tradespeople, could have borrowed this article from Greek when speaking whatever Latin pidgin they were speaking?

After all, we saw this phenomenon of cross-pollination much later with the Italian lingua franca of the Mediterranean (which e.g. adopted Arabic habit of doubling words such as poco poco).

vectory
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fralau
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    Not "borrowed" exactly; that word has a more specific meaning which is slightly different. But I like your description, "cross-pollinization". That fits well. This kind of thing happens over and over with neighbouring languages. It's normally called a Sprachbund feature. – Omar and Lorraine Oct 16 '19 at 10:02
  • Providing the hypothesis was verified, would that not be a borrowing, in the linguistic sense? We would have a couple of words that traveled, with minor alteration (and without barely a calque) from a language to another. In the extreme, it could be that illus and illa were calques of Greek. – fralau Oct 16 '19 at 10:26
  • Interesting point. I don't know exactly. But you have a question there, if you pots it as one I'm sure it will get an answer. – Omar and Lorraine Oct 16 '19 at 10:28
  • I agree: I answered a question with another question... – fralau Oct 16 '19 at 10:29
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    Apparently a lot of rural Southern Italy (I'm thinking of Calabria in particular) was still Greek-speaking until early modern times, so Southern Italian dialects could have gotten it directly from Greek via diglossia. – Anton Tykhyy Oct 16 '19 at 18:08
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    I would be skeptical if that's what happened for a number of reasons. Ille was reduced to o/a also in Portuguese (which would have far less Greek influence; l being a weaker sound). Ancient/Koine Greek only had the vowel w/ glottal sound in the nominative masculine and feminine, the remaining forms all start with /t/; plus Ancient/Koine Greek used the article more extensively than we see in Romance languages (repeated for articles or prepositional phrases in some constructs) – eques Oct 17 '19 at 14:21
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As I understand it, development of articles is a consequence of a sociocultural and political comprehension of the self and others outside of a social collective with greater confidence about declaring subjects in their own right as an objective entity. Slavic languages which develop a separation later than others have other collectivist cultural parallels - where the lack an equivalent to weirdguild or Roman law shows a collectivist approach to conflict management.

In essence, what I'm trying to say is that Greece had 1200 city states. Differentiation and segregation of identity would naturally place pressure on the emergence on an article that emphasizes that separation and the conception of self as agent within the polis and further puts pressure on development of more precise identification of ownership of objects.

Roman state, on the other hand, emphasizes Pax Romana, a universalist symbolism that is among other things reflected in the universal religion they develop - Christianity.

For 700+ years they had republican symbolism and imagery, where individualism took a secondary role to a national conception of self and personal property.

In the Germanic chieftain societies, you had tribalism and weird guild, which provides for personal property, nuclear family with stiff penalties for infidelity and this creates space for conception if self as separate from the tribe and what is collective or social. The emergence of self, then, as an independent agent in frequent competition with those of the same social group for status and power and women would lend itself to an innumeration of things via articles that would specify among other things what object belongs to whom.

As Italy becomes balkanized into many city states, you have the same sort of diversification of identities and emergence of a conception of self apart from a strong central government domination and so I see the development of articles as a consequence of 1. Decline in authoritarian pressure to conform to social expectations and definitions that place the collective welfare ahead of individual, and 2. Growth of wealth and concepts of personal property that require such specificity for the preservation of personal ownership rights.

The PIE theory would seem to correlate this - initially, no articles, as the conception is more collectivist - all the way to the present - more individualist, and the Slavic societies which retain a more collectivist orientation still being without articles would seem to suggest that also.

Dan Todd
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Looking at difference in using nouns(simplification) in Italian vs Latin and looking at even pre French/Norman english which underwent a massive simplification due to contact with similar but not similar enough to understand Danish, it seems like the languages used in a relatively larger area with many native speakers of similar and also totally different languages underwent certain simplification over time. The language lost certain(more complicated) structures which had to be replaced with something else. Classical latin was already old in 1st century and differed from vulgar latin. Even now in communication between parties who do not speak(or speak well) the same language the words like "this" and "that" (with their gender variations if they exist in that language) are used wildly, sometimes with some nonverbal pointing, which leads to both parties to use the language incorrectly. In a world without widespread literacy and clearly set language this might lead to outcome like that. In current age there still exist dialects which can slightly differ even if the places are in relative proximity with some differences notable even within area of 20 to 50 km with much bigger differences if distance increases but with widespread literacy and an official language with set rules in place the need for change or simplification is massively reduced. This is just my opinion. I am not really sure how antient greek fits into this, it is bit of an outlier but it is also a much older language.

The previous reply pointing to some "comprehension of the self" and "individualism" seems like a wild stretch. Major languages which did not lose their original slightly complicated grammatical structure lack this feature.

Martin Maarva
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