From: Carl William Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 29 1997 - 12:20:27 EST
On Mon, 29 Dec 1997, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> At 10:01 PM 12/25/97, Ben Crick wrote:
> > When people get arguing about the arthrous/anarthrous use of various
> > nouns and noun clauses, I just wonder how on earth the Romans and the
> > Russians ever manage to understand the right meaning of anything, when
> > they can communicate quite happily without any articles at all! I've no
> > idea whether Czech has the article; cognate Russian certainly has not.
>
> And of course Greek had no article prior to Homer...
To be more accurate, Greek had no article prior to the 6th c. BCE; what
later became the article is a weak demonstrative in Homer. There's a neat
little discussion of this in Bruno Snell's _Discovery of the Mind_
(originally _Die Entdeckung des Geistes) entitled something like, "The
Invention of the Article." It's old (1950's) but a pretty good discussion.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:38:42 EDT