r/LewthaWIP

For nouns, Leuth currently distinguishes definiteness (no article, ∅) and indefiniteness (indefinite article, o):

• o huma = 'a man'
• ∅ huma = 'the man'; 'man' (as a general concept)
• o humas = '[some] men'
• ∅ humas = 'the men'; 'men' (as a general concept, men in general)

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u/ProxPxD argued that having no article at all would be a better choice. As simple as this idea is, I hadn't considered it before, focusing instead on improving the system of Esperanto.

He said: forcing the IAL users to a binary choice (definite vs. indefinite) for all nouns is a difficulty, while often not being necessary, since what we are referring to is often easily inferrable by the context. It would be better to leave it vague; when people want to have an explicit definiteness or indefiniteness, they could express it anyway easily, by using for example 'that' and 'some'.

I added: another point in favour of that position is that Latin, which Leuth often uses as an authoritative model, doesn't use articles.

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My doubt: we see that all languages that descended from Latin, which didn't have articles, do have a full set of articles two thousand years later; while Greek, that had a full set of articles two thousand years ago, still does today.

• Latin [no articles] ... → ... Romance languages [articles]
• Ancient Greek [articles] ... → ... modern Greek [still articles]

My question: is it more natural

1. for an article-less language to develop them, or
2. for a language with articles to lose them?

If the first direction of development is prevalent, it may be better to provide Leuth with the article from the beginning: for an IAL that we desire to be easy, it's better to already have simple logical rules than having less logical, more complex rules arise unorganizedly when people start using words as de facto articles: one, simple, logical article vs many less optimized ones.

I told ProxPxD that when the community grew we could have a public discussion: experts of linguistics could give useful opinions and insights. The community (while growing faster than I expected: thanks to you all!) is still relatively small, so this post is not meant for that intended public discussion: I just wanted to present you the idea.