Why Latin doesn't have a word for “THE” • Evolution of Grammatical Articles in Languages

how come the romance languages have an article the word for the and latin doesn't and the word article articulus in latin how does latin have a word for the article when land doesn't even have an article well we're going to solve that mystery today i'm luke and this is pulimity this is a really great question that i received once that we have articulo how do you say articulo in latin articulus well latin doesn't have an articulus how could they even talk about articulus well latin speakers in antiquity would learn ancient greek an ancient greek does have an article an ancient pronunciation and this article is something that latin doesn't have but since latin speakers ancient romans who were latin speakers would learn ancient greek they would need a word to describe this grammatical phenomenon the greek word is and that actually means a joint just like joints in our fingers that's in fact where the medical term arthritis is from from the uh the pain and the joints arthritis arthron the joint in latin the word for joint is an artus and a diminutive is an articulus so maybe this is an artus but these could be articuli and then since this is a calc a direct translation from greek in the latin of arthron into articulus the is this word which means the word for the well what does this word do uh an article it can be definite or indefinite in many languages say english where the is the definite article and the word a or an is the indefinite article what they do is they articulate they join that word that noun usually with other words in the sentence so ancient greek has an article but latin doesn't that's kind of interesting i remember the first time that i wanted to learn lats and i thought there's no word for eel and la like italian that's so strange because i knew italian first it just seems so bizarre and unnatural but now as a latin speaker i can tell you that oh it's perfectly fine in fact there are lots of languages that don't have any articles a lot of indo-european languages like slavic languages russian for example something that the slavic languages and latin and ancient greek all have in common is that except for bulgarian of course these languages have well-developed case systems bulgarian is an interesting exception and we'll get back to that so latin has about five cases as nominative genitive dative accusative additive and vocative um slavic languages have a lot of those cases and even one or two more depending on the language slavic languages don't have articles except for bulgarian now ancient greek doesn't have an ablative case it has one case less than latin and it has an article so one linguistic theory or one understanding is that as languages if they they can develop case systems they can lose them again they can redevelop them all kinds of things can happen uh with languages there's a mistaken idea that languages get simpler and dumber over time if that were true then we would talk like cavemen further in the future and that in the past cavemen would have had the most complex developed hyper sanskrit greek latin russian language you could imagine so that's obviously not true languages seem sophisticated if we only look at their grammatical paradigms or they seem less sophisticated like say english if they don't have a lot of grammatical complexity in that kind of paradigm but in reality so many languages have basically the same amount of complexity and expressive ability it's just certain nuances and the way things overlap can be different so a case system is not indicative of a language's sophistication so this thinking of antiquity as this lofty white marble simple thing like the altar de la patria here in rome is sort of a lovely praising of that that kind of kind of thinking really there are a lot of great things in ancient languages as well as antiquity um but there are a lot of great and expressive things in pretty much every language and pretty much every language has the same ability to express the vast human range of experience knowledge and thinking so that said whether language has a lot of cases or not doesn't make it better or superior but why then does the article develop well it looks like the reason that greek has it has ancient greek just has a definite article a word for the it doesn't have a word for are an which in modern greek is uh ana and those words developed later as a word for air and monogamy but not an ancient greek so ancient greek has this and maybe because it doesn't have the ablative case maybe because it lost one of those cases in an older form of greek and homeric greek we can see that the word that the article um the word for the ancient greek is used demonstratively sometimes like word for this or that or even as a pronoun sometimes and that shows us that as the ancient greek language developed it started using this word this word that hole it used to be just a demonstrative in a archaic form of ancient greek and then slowly became attached to every single substative as a definite article and as ancient greek also has merged the modern greek rather has merged the dative and the genitive cases in most situations and they have also the in definite article the romance languages in the west have lost their case systems romanian still has a partial case system something like modern greek but the western romance languages lost them and the western romance languages all have the article they have a word for them actually speaking of ancient and modern greek do something weird which is interesting and so does portuguese where they say the in front of a person's name so uh like in ancient greek hey maria the maria maria in modern greek that's something that that languages can do too and that's to show that articles develop spontaneously in different languages where they came from in the germanic languages is different from the evolution in greek it's different from the evolution in the romance languages and languages simply don't require them the way that bulgarian developed its own article is also particular bulgarian doesn't have a case system the way that the other slavic languages do and it has an article and the other slavic languages have a really intricate case system and they don't have an article so there seems to be an interesting relationship that what the article helps to do by joining and articulating language are the sentence and ideas what it does is it adds an expressive level that case systems can also provide it's a little bit like the fact that slavic languages as well as ancient greek and latin all have a neuter gender whereas western romance and uh english obviously has no grammatical gender for the most part when it comes to basic nouns um it has what's the point of a neuter gender i mean i always thought that too when i went from italian to latin why do we have a this neuter and the reason is that what it does is it gives another level of variety to the speaker and all this is subconsciously going on in the mind of the speaker and the collective group of speakers when we know that when we hear an ending that is a neuter ending for one word and then an adjective can come much later in the uh in the sentence which has a similar ending or we know that's a neuter ending we connect those together it's like we have three colors or something and we can see those how those three colors intermix within a sentence that's one way that sometimes people parse languages like latin and greek you can color all right these are all in the dative case so they're all be red these are nominal they'll be green or whatever color systems you want which is an interesting way to kind of think about it and so this is how these things interrelate the article adds a layer of definition but it seems to develop after the loss of case systems i hope you found this interesting from rome italy [Music] so we'd learn ancient greek an ancient greek does have an article it only has one one of those is pronounced e in modern greek but in ancient greek pronunciations the [Laughter] very good um

Channel: polýMATHY

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Keywords: polýMATHY, luke amadeus ranieri, luke amadeus, luke ranieri, polymath, polymathy, latin pronunciation, latin correct pronunciation, latin classical pronunciation, classical vs ecclesiastical, international phonetic alphabet, rome italy, altare della patria, articolo, grammatical article, where do articles come from, why does latin not have articles, are there no articles in latin, are articles used in latin, why do some languages not have articles, when did latin develop articles

Id: Evx-3RkhtIc

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022