ANSWERS: 1
  • Latin didn't have them because they aren't really necessary and there hadn't been any compelling reasons for the Romans to create them. The real question is why the Romance languages developed definite articles when their parent (Latin) did not have them. In his book, "A History of the Spanish Language", Ralph Penny suggests that the intial development of the Romance articles might have been motivated by the fact that many people in Rome and the east were bilingual in Latin and Greek. In other words, it was influenced by the Greek use of articles.

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