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Out of the blue
In my studies in the field of linguistics I occasionally come across something which seems to demolish a belief I have long held. For years I have known that suffixed definite articles (hereinafter SDAs) are used in the Scandinavian languages and also in Romanian and some other languages in the Balkan sprachbund. Now I had always assumed that the phenomenon had arisen independently in two places quite remote from each other, but then somebody pointed out that SDAs were a feature of the Northern Russian dialects. I began to wonder whether this was something which had existed in the Slavic languages, but now survived only at their northern and southern extremities. So I asked if anyone could enlighten me, but, having received no answer, decided to research the matter myself.
Nothing so simple!
It emerged at an early stage in my researches that Proto-Slavic distinguished between definiteness and indefiniteness, something which I had not previously known. Here is an extract from the Wikipedia article:
Proto-Slavic had developed a distinction between "indefinite" and "definite" adjective inflection, much like Germanic strong and weak inflection. The definite inflection was used to refer to specific or known entities, similar to the use of the definite article "the" in English, while the indefinite inflection was unspecific or referred to unknown or arbitrary entities, like the English indefinite article "a". The indefinite inflection was identical to the inflection of o- and a-stem nouns, while the definite inflection was formed by suffixing the relative/anaphoric pronoun *jь to the end of the normal inflectional endings. Both the adjective and the suffixed pronoun were presumably declined as separate words originally, but already within Proto-Slavic they had become contracted and fused to some extent.
On the face of it, this makes my hypothesis at least possible, but it is still a long way from the current usage in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Northern Russian. So I was not too surprised to discover that the SDAs in Slavic languages were of relatively recent origin. See this extract from the Wikipedia article on the history of the Bulgarian language (unedited):
The earliest signs of post-positive definite article dates from the early 13th century with the Dobreyshevo Gospel (Добрейшево Евангелие) where the construction "злыотъ рабъ" ("the evil person") was used. Old Bulgarian relative pronouns иже, яже and еже ("which," masculine, feminine, neuter) were at that time replaced by interrogative pronouns with the suffix -то: който, която, което.
So we now go back to the hypothesis of two separate developments of the same phenomenon. However, that is not quite the end of the story. I also discovered a very interesting paper by J.K. Kusmenko of the Humboldt University of Berlin.[Note 1] His contention is that the phenomenon arose in the two separate regions for the same reason, contact with substratum languages which had "possessive declination", as he describes it. Both the Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages had developed possessive suffixes and, moreover, the possessive suffixes can have no possessive semantics at all. In this case the suffixes of the third and the second person serve only “to point out, emphasize, concretise and individualize an object which is at that point known to the speech participants”.[Note 2] This means that these possessive suffixes are serving as definite articles, much as in English the possessive determiner your (or yer) can serve as one in colloquial speech, e.g. "That's yer posh folks for you, innit?"
The paper can be seen here and I have also attached it to this page (see below). To follow the logic of his argument it is really necessary to read the article carefully.
During my researches I came across another fact of which I had been unaware. In Macedonian there are three sets of suffixed articles and the extra sets perform much the same function as demonstrative determiners in English. The three types are medial (the), proximal (this) and distal (that). See this section of the Wikipedia article. SDAs, or something very similar, occur in other languages outside the areas discussed in this piece and a good example is Assamese – see definiteness in the Morphology section of this article.
Notes - As he is about the same age as I am, I am not too sure whether he is a current member of staff.
(Geographers might understand the reference!) - See 3.1 Semantics of the possessive suffixes in the Finno-Ugric and the Turkic languages on p.11.
The words in quotation marks are taken from one of his sources.
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