Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 March 30

= March 30 =

"A/an" versus "one"
One interesting thing I have found about the English language is that "a/an" and "one" are separate words. I can't think of any other language with a similar rule for articles. At least of the languages I know about, Swedish, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese have the same word for both, and Finnish, Estonian, Latvian and Russian don't even use articles. Are there any other languages with a similar rule as English? J I P &#124; Talk 15:51, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The Wikipedia article titled Article (grammar) should help; there's two large charts of both definite and indefinite articles in a wide variety of languages; it should also be noted that articles are not a universal concept, and many languages mark definiteness and indefiniteness in completely different ways, such as word position, suffixes, prefixes, or internal vowel changes in a word. And as you note, many languages have no articles at all; where definiteness is determined by context alone.  -- Jayron 32 16:30, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I read through the article, but couldn't find anything about the relation between the indefinite article and the word for the number one. In English they are different, but I don't know of any other language where they are. J I P  &#124; Talk 17:56, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The etymologies might explain. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:03, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * See WALS chapter 38. The map shows several languages where the indefinite article is different from the numeral. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:10, 30 March 2021 (UTC)


 * They are separate words in Dutch, although the spelling is (sometimes) identical. The indefinite article een is pronounced /ən/, the number 1 (also een) is pronounced /en/, and where necessary it is spelled één to distinguish it from the indefinite article. See een and één. - Lindert (talk) 19:15, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * In Afrikaans orthography they are always spelled differently: 'n for the article, and een for the numeral. --Lambiam 08:33, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I would say they are different in German. The article is ein with a large number of confusing continuations that depend on gender and case, but in no case is it eins, which is the word for "one". --Trovatore (talk) 19:41, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Trovatore -- "Eins" is the form used in counting ("Eins, zwei..."). The more relevant question is whether there's any difference between "A house" and "One house" when expressed in German... AnonMoos (talk) 19:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah &mdash; you mean "one" used as a numerical determiner. OK, that's a sort of an interesting question, given that in English there's a difference in nuance.  If I say a house on this street has been sold recently, I'm probably thinking of a particular house, and I don't really mean to exclude that some other house has sold as well.  But if I say one house on this street has been sold recently, there's at least a reasonable chance that I think I'm giving the exact number, and in particular it isn't two.  I don't know any other language where you can make that distinction as concisely. --Trovatore (talk) 22:55, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
 * In spoken German, the same distinction would be made by shifting the stress: 'ein HAUS' vs. 'EIN Haus'. --Morinox (talk) 07:22, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm, you could do that in English too &mdash; something like, maybe rendering the word "a" as /eɪ/ instead of /ə/. Is that what you mean?  That doesn't strike me as exactly the same thing. --Trovatore (talk) 19:01, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * According to Wiktionary there is a clear difference in Mòcheno, a variety of German. The indefinite article is a(n), while the numeral is oa's.  --Lambiam 08:52, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Likewise in many Swiss German dialects, for example in Zürich German: 'eis Huus' = one house, 'es Huus' = a house. And they're distinct for all three grammatical genders ('ei Frau', 'e Frau' - 'ein Maa', 'en Maa'). And also distinct when inflected in the dative case: "enere Frau" = to a woman, but "einere Frau" (to one woman), "emene Maa" (to a man) but "eim Maa" (to one man), "emene Huus" (to a house) but "eim Huus" (to one house). ---Sluzzelin talk  09:07, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * In Welsh and Cornish, there's no indefinite article at all. Alansplodge (talk) 12:13, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
 * There's a large number of languages listed at an/translations#Article that don't use the indefinite article. Not exactly what JIP was asking for, but similar. Like in English, the ambiguity of 'a house' and 'one house' doesn't exist in these languages either. ---Sluzzelin talk  13:36, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Similar to German and Dutch, the difference between the indefinite article and the numeral in Norwegian is often subtle, but it is there if you look for it. In oral communication, the difference is simply stress: The numeral is stressed, while the article is not. In writing, the stress is marked by spelling: The article is written en (m.), ei (f.), et (n.) (in bokmål) or ein, ei, eit (in nynorsk). The numeral is written én, éi, ett or éin, éi, eitt. The stressed written form may, however, be omitted if the context makes it unnecessary. To a slightly lesser degree, the same distinction is made in Danish, but only if the context makes necessary. In Swedish, however, the stress is by convention usually not marked.

I would therefore say that they are definitely different words, but that they in written form sometimes are homonyms. --T*U (talk) 11:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Im most if not all Indo-European languages which have indefinite articles, these are derived from the numeral 'one', so the question basically is how far they have grammaticalized these indefinite articles into a distict phonetic shape. The pathway always seems to be indistinguishable > unstressed > reduced, with English and Dutch representing the final stage.
 * Outside of the IE world, some languages have indefinite articles which are not related to the numeral 'one', e.g. many Salishan languages (unfortunately, the article has little information about it). –Austronesier (talk) 11:43, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
 * "One" and "a/an" share the same etymon indeed. There are at least three situations we're talking about: "one" (name of the number), "one" (accompanied by a noun) and "a/an" (indefinite article). For these situations, different languages come up with different concepts, so finding languages where the English counterparts translate into different words is not hard, but that is probably not what you're looking for. In order to be able to compare anything, the usages in both English and the target language have to coincide in all situations. This is already hard to solve. In Czech, the number is "jedna" (feminin), and in Bulgarian, it's "едно" (neuter), but with nouns, all three genders exist ("jeden/jedna/jedno", "един/една/едно"). It is true that most Slavic languages don't have articles, but the absence says something about the meaning too. In Bulgarian, where definite articles exist, but indefinite articles don't, the roles are clearly distributed. Then there is also "раз/raz" in Russian and Polish reserved for counting. The table in the article Article marks "yes" for Basque in the column "Indefinite", but Basque doesn't have an indefinite article. There's the definite suffix "-a" and the lack of it theoretically indicates indefiniteness, but it doesn't work like that either. The predicate in a sentence has to be marked with the definite suffix even if the translation is "a/an" in English. "Bat" is the name of the number and also used with nouns, but in actual usage, it competes with the suffix "-a". Compare the opening sentences of two articles from the Basque Wikipedia: "Quezon Hiria Filipinetako hiria da. Bayreuth Alemaniako Bavaria estatuko hiri bat da." In both sentences, it states that it is a city somewhere. So, does this example qualify? The problem is the further we move from English, the higher the chances that the way of thinking completely changes. OP's question also assumes that "one" and "a/an" are seperate words in English to begin with, which is debatable. Italian/Spanish "uno" and "un" work more or less the same, but the phonetics and the spelling make them seem more like variants of one another. --94.134.89.153 (talk) 01:53, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Uh, no, it's really not debatable. They are clearly separate words. --Trovatore (talk) 03:35, 4 April 2021 (UTC)