In days of yore, when the deeds of Beowulf still counted as ‘current events’, the Germanic languages had no word for ‘the’. Thus, when they wanted to emphasize the specificity of a noun, they used the ancestor of ‘that’.
The neuter form of this word, which looked a lot like ‘that’, evolved into the ‘het’ of Dutch-speaking lands and the ‘det’ of Scandinavia.
Like their cousins on the west side of Het Kanaal, the Dutch decided that ‘the’ should always precede the noun it modifies. The Scandinavians, however, settled upon a firm ‘it depends’.
When the noun in question stood alone, the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes placed ‘the word formerly known as “that”’ after it. (The kids in the philology club call this a ‘post-positive definite article’.) When, however, the ‘the’ kept company with both a noun and an adjective, the future fans of open-faced sandwiches followed the Anglo-Dutch convention of putting it first.
Alas, the simple elegance of these arrangements ran aground on the rocks and shoals of grammatical gender. Thus, in addition to the kissing cousins of ‘that’, which kept company with noun of the neuter persuasion, the MUGGLE languages needed a way to stress the specificity of members of the competing category, that of common nouns. (This, you may remember, is the one composed of people, places, and things that used to be either masculine or feminine.)
In all MUGGLE tongues, the neuter form of ‘the’ invariably ends with the letter ‘T’. (If you are looking for a way to remember this fact, emphasize the central consonant of the word ‘neuTer’.) To put things another way, in Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, the common forms of the definite article lack the terminal ‘T’.
The plural form of the Dutch ‘the’ imitates the common form. Thus, we have de geit (‘the goat’) and de geiten (‘the goats’) as well as de ogen (‘the eyes’). To put things another way, the singular neuter form (het), with a great big ‘T’ riding in its caboose, provides the exception to the general rule of ‘Dutch de equals English the.’
The Scandinavian languages, however, employ a pair of distinct, but gender-free, plurals. When serving as tail-end Charlie on a stand-alone noun, this form features the letter ‘N’. When, however, it modifies the combination of an adjective and a plural noun, it is written like its Dutch counterpart.
The plural forms of words reflect reality. Thus, the English-speaker intent upon learning a MUGGLE tongue will have little difficulty dealing with the plural forms of ‘the’ in Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, or Swedish. The same, alas, is not true for the singular forms.
That’s the bad news. Here follows the good.
Determining the proper form of ‘the’ for a person, place, or thing boils down to the isolation of nouns that bear the scarlet ‘T’ of singular neutrality. We will address ways of doing that in the next post in this series.
To be continued …
Note: In this series, I use the version of written Norwegian called Bøkmål (‘book language’). This practice reflects neither prejudice nor preference. Rather, I use Bøkmål because most of the resources I used in writing this piece employ that register.
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Looking forward to it. This is fun.