1180: Showing Definite Articles with Case Mar 3, 2018

Plenty of languages don't have definite or indefinite articles, but as with everything, there are ways to get around this information. Sometimes this happens that the older form of languages that now have these articles, such as English and French which came from the article-lacking Old English (OE) and Latin gain these through deictic pronouns (e.g. 'that' and 'this'). Other languages just use context as well; it is fairly easy to know in the context of a conversation whether a noun is definite (e.g. 'the book') or indefinite (e.g. 'a book') or not defined (e.g. 'books'). Moreover, this is clearer in Latin, OE, and other more inflected languages like Russian that use cases, though of course languages like German have both cases and these articles. Kalaallisut has no definite articles but they have ways to get around that with cases as well, on the part of the agent. For example, in an active construction that uses a transitive verb, the ergative case  will be used to indicate that the argument (conceptually similar to an object) is definite, but will use the absolutive case to indicate that the argument is indefinite. This is in spite of the fact that an absolutive is the argument (i.e. like an object, not a subject) of a transitive verb, but in this situation the construction is subverted to note a difference in meaning.
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