Some curious uses of

Posted by Smokey Stover on January 16, 2004

In Reply to: Some curious uses of posted by Joanne on January 15, 2004

: I believe its like you said : "the" transformed the adjective "white" into a noun and made "pillow" its attribute, which basically changed the importance of the words in the sentence to emphasize the contrast.

: Thanks for the historical insight of the Latin language!

In a previous post I carelessly said that the definite article in Romance languages was derived from the demonstrative pronoun in Latin. I should have said demonstrative adjective. Moreover, when I said that I believed that the Germanic languages had a similar history in this respect, I should have emphasized my profound ignorance of the history of Germanic languages, especially since the earliest complete Germanic texts, such as the Gothic Bible, Beowulf, the Norse sagas, all date from the Middle Ages, way past the time of any such syntactical shifts. Maybe some Germanic scholar will enlighten us. SS