Comment on International Woof
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 weeks agoSeriously, English has its flaws, but the simplification of article adjectives is one area where it shines.
When it comes to the articles themselves, it’s less that English simplified them and more that it never developed case marks for them. For example, when se→þē split into what’s today “the” and “that”, that “the” was already invariable.
In contrast, not only German repurposed the demonstrative “der” (that, which, who) into an article in a cleaner way, but it’s also dumping most grammatical case info into the article - so it’s bound to preserve a lot more forms for them. (It still simplified them a bit though. Compare this with this).
[Sorry for hopping in to nerd out about language.]
lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Well, Old English baggs to differ. English lost its case markings on articles early on and kept them on nouns a while longer while German kept them on articles and simplified nouns much more early on.
… as did English with “se”/“þē” which started as a demonstrative the same way der/die/das did.
Again, German didn’t dump anything into articles but rather lost it everywhere else.
There is this idea that this fostered the process of using der/die/das much more often (which made it from a demonstrative to an article) but I disagree because it was a widespread process, not only in German but in huge parts of Europe, including beside Romance languages also English were this reasoning doesn’t work (as shown above).
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
That sē is still the determiner, now with an additional function as an article, not an independent article. What I said applies to the article as its own thing, i.e. when “the” and “that” were already independent words - in fact their decoupling is directly tied to the same loss of the endings that caused the morphological case system to go kaboom.
I’m talking about the informational load, you’re talking about the phonetic changes.