the

Articles are an interesting component of any indoeuropean language. There are of course slavic langauges which do not have them, as well as languages like Japanese which is deficient in articles as well as plurals and gender. A question which one is drawn to ask is why is it that when Russians learn English, they have three choices -- definite, indefinite or no article, and if they chose randomly they would get about a third of the cases correct; they achieve significantly less than this.

jpff@cs.bath.ac.uk

Last modified: Wed Sep 5 09:07:08 BST 2001