# Definite articles with proper nouns



## Ben Jamin

Hello,
I know two languages that use the definite artilcle before both personal names and other names: Portuguese (O Pedro) and Greek (O Nikos). (Incidentally they use the same word as masculine definite article). Other languages use the definite article before names of countries (French) or other geographical objects (English does it sometimes: "the Thames"). 
Does anybody know the processes that lead to developing of such a system, or any rules that correlate this phenomenon with other features in the language. 
Looking at French and Portuguese one could suspect a common Celtic substrate (also in the case of "the Thames"), but is this plausible?
Greek and Portuguese seem to be so far away from each other that an influence on each other seems improbable.


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## ahvalj

Some comments. 

Greek had this system since it developed the article, namely between Homer and the Classical Ancient Greek, i. e. some 15 centuries before the article appeared in Portuguese. 

Continental Celtic attested in the Celtiberian, Lepontic and Gaulish inscriptions had no article.

The graphic similarity of the Greek and Portuguese masculine definite articles is indeed a coincidence as they originate from unrelated proto-forms (_lo_ in Portuguese and ho in Ancient Greek, further from _illum_ in Latin and *_so_ in pre-Grek).


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## Nino83

In Northern Italy it is used before feminine proper nouns (_la Maria, la Paola, la Francesca_) and in some Regions (like in Lombardy) also with masculine proper nouns (_il Mario, il Paolo, il Francesco_). So, some Celtic substrate could be possible. 
What happens in Celtic languages (Irish, Scottish gaelic, Breton, Welsh)?


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## Stoggler

Nino83 said:


> In Northern Italy it is used before feminine proper nouns (_la Maria, la Paola, la Francesca_) and in some Regions (like in Lombardy) also with masculine proper nouns (_il Mario, il Paolo, il Francesco_). So, some Celtic substrate could be possible.
> What happens in Celtic languages (Irish, Scottish gaelic, Breton, Welsh)?



Well there's no definite articles used with peoples' names in Welsh and Scottish Gaelic (the two Celtic languages I'm familiar with) and I don't think it happens in Irish or Breton (both close to Scots Gaelic and Welsh respectively).

Scottish Gaelic and Irish have a vocative case where 'a' is placed before someone's name, which happens to be how the definite article sometimes appears in the two languages, but that's as close as you get to definite articles in front of names.  It's just coincidence that the vocative marker and the definite article can both be 'a' and it's the result of natural sound changes over the centuries.  

As with Germanic and Romance languages, the Celtic definite articles came from reduction from demonstrative pronouns (from Pr-Celtic *sindo-).  I'm not sure of the timing of the rise of Celtic definite articles though.


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## CapnPrep

Ben Jamin said:


> Does anybody know the processes that lead to developing of such a system, or any rules that correlate this phenomenon with other features in the language.


Proper nouns are typically definite, so they will naturally interact with the system of articles (in languages that have articles for marking definiteness). A language may give priority to economy of expression, in which case proper nouns will be used without articles. Or it may prefer uniformity of syntactic construction, in which case proper nouns will require an article just like common nouns. Or a language may settle on a mixed usage, depending on semantic class, syntactic context, stylistic register, etc. 

I don't think it makes much sense to look for common ancestry or ancient influences whenever two languages show similar behavior in this regard, since it is clear from comparing closely related languages that this is not a stable aspect of grammar that can be traced back to prehistoric times with any degree of confidence.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> Some comments.
> 
> Greek had this system since it developed the article, namely between Homer and the Classical Ancient Greek, i. e. some 15 centuries before the article appeared in Portuguese.
> 
> Continental Celtic attested in the Celtiberian, Lepontic and Gaulish inscriptions had no article.
> 
> The graphic similarity of the Greek and Portuguese masculine definite articles is indeed a coincidence as they originate from unrelated proto-forms (_lo_ in Portuguese and ho in Ancient Greek, further from _illum_ in Latin and *_so_ in pre-Grek).



Well, the old Celtic languages had no articles, but developed them, in later times. When did that happen, approximately? Did it happen after the descendant languages of Latin developed?

The languages that have no articles, however, can have a widespread use of demonstrative pronouns together with proper names. In Polish, for example there exists a custom of such use in retelling stories. When one relates a book or a film to a person that has not read/seen it, one often uses demonstrative pronouns together with the names of the protagonists of the story like "There was a man called James. And *this *James had a daughter called Jane, and *this *Jane had a sweetheart ...". 

This custom is considered very colloquial and even uncultivated, so you will never find it in print, except a quotation of a dialog.

Is it possible that use of demonstrative pronouns with proper nouns in old Celtic languages had somehow been projected to descendant languages of Latin?


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> Well, the old Celtic languages had no articles, but developed them, in later times. When did that happen, approximately? Was after the descendant languages of Latin developed?
> 
> Is it possible that use of demonstrative pronouns with proper nouns in old Celtic languages had somehow been projected to descendant languages of Latin?


The Old Irish (the 7th century onwards) already has a definite article. What happened on the continent is unknown, because the Celtic languages were being replaced by Latin exactly in the centuries when both they and Latin experienced similar developments in grammar. I had mentioned Celtic because there is absolutely no evidence about the article usage in the continental Celtic languages and hence no reasons to ascribe any particularities of the Romance articles to the Celtic substrate. We simply know nothing on this matter.


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## myšlenka

Ben Jamin said:


> Does anybody know the processes that lead to developing of such a system, or any rules that correlate this phenomenon with other features in the language.


  Nouns in general can be accompanied by (in)definite articles and given that proper nouns are also nouns I don't see anything surprising in such a development. As you mentioned, it is standard in Portuguese and Greek, but you find non-standard use of articles with names in German, Scandinavian and many other languages. In my opinion, there is simply no need to invoke explanations based on substrate effects for such a recurrent phenomenon.


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## ernest_

In standard Catalan, proper nouns are preceded by the definite article. In the beginning, it started as a form of courtesy. The particles used were en/na, from Latin domine et domina. Later on this usage gained traction also in less formal registers and became widespread. Finally en/na lost popularity in favour of the normal definite article el/la. Nowadays both forms are accepted, but the latter is more common. The article is dropped in front of a notorious name, e.g. _Karl Marx_, and not _el Karl Marx_. In this case, it doesn't look like it has anything to do with a Celtic substrate.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Is it possible that use of demonstrative pronouns with proper nouns in old Celtic languages had somehow been projected to descendant languages of Latin?


I don't quite understand why you are so hooked on Celtic. It is only one of the language groups that developed articles out of demonstrative pronouns and it isn't even the first group to do so.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> I don't quite understand why you are so hooked on Celtic. It is only one of the language groups that developed articles out of demonstrative pronouns and it isn't even the first group to do so.


Well, I am not hooked on Celtic. I wrote it only once. It was only to pursue the possibility of a common background for the use of articles before proper names in Portuguese and French. I infer from the answers I got that this assumtion was wrong, and I am satisfied whith it.


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## berndf

Ok, I see.


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## bearded

Considering BenJamin's hypothesis, before the Romans arrived , Northern Italy was inhabited and dominated by the Gauls during many years. The influence of Celtic pronunciation (i.e.how Latin was pronounced by the Gauls) was so strong that today Northern-Italian dialects are also called ''Gaulish-Italian''.  Well, it is precisely in this terrytory, as mentioned by Nino83 above, that the dterminative article is used before first names in the colloquial language.  Is it just a coincidence?


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## berndf

bearded man said:


> Considering BenJamin's hypothesis, before the Romans arrived , Northern Italy was inhabited and dominated by the Gauls during many years. The influence of Celtic pronunciation (i.e.how Latin was pronounced by the Gauls) was so strong that today Northern-Italian dialects are also called ''Gaulish-Italian''.  Well, it is precisely in this terrytory, as mentioned by Nino83 above, that the dterminative article is used before first names in the colloquial language.  Is it just a coincidence?


_We don't know if Celtic had articles at all and the known attestations lack articles and the non-existent definite article in Celtic must have been the origin of of the definite article in Northern Italian_. I fail to understand that logic.


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## ahvalj

bearded man said:


> Considering BenJamin's hypothesis, before the Romans arrived , Northern Italy was inhabited and dominated by the Gauls during many years. The influence of Celtic pronunciation (i.e.how Latin was pronounced by the Gauls) was so strong that today Northern-Italian dialects are also called ''Gaulish-Italian''.  Well, it is precisely in this terrytory, as mentioned by Nino83 above, that the dterminative article is used before first names in the colloquial language.  Is it just a coincidence?


Dare I repeat that the continental Celtic inscriptions of the last centuries BC and the first century AC contain no traces of an article? They had a standard Latin-like grammar with a free word order, endings, cases etc. If Celtic had no article at that time, could it influence the Romance usage of 1000+ years later?


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## bearded

OK, then it is just a coincidence.


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## ahvalj

Examples of continental Celtic phrases can be found in _~ · 2010 · The Celtic languages:_ 28–43 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJN19lRXpuWHRMa28/edit?usp=sharing) and in _Delamarre X · 2003 · Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise_ (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJWktqUTR0Y0VISVE/edit?usp=sharing). I would be glad if somebody shows me any articles in these inscriptions. _Isos/ison_ is still a pronoun.


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## Gavril

Armenian (or at least Western Armenian) allows proper names to combine with definite articles.

E.g., the personal name _Ani_ can be combined with the definite article to form _Ani*n*_, literally "the Ani". (In Armenian the definite article is generally suffixed to the noun.)

I'm not sure whether there is a big semantic or contextual difference between the "plain" form of a name (_Ani_) and the definite form (_Anin_).


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## berndf

German always uses the definite article for rivers, sometimes for countries and some dialects always use it for personal names.


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## Ben Jamin

ahvalj said:


> Dare I repeat that the continental Celtic inscriptions of the last centuries BC and the first century AC contain no traces of an article? They had a standard Latin-like grammar with a free word order, endings, cases etc. If Celtic had no article at that time, could it influence the Romance usage of 1000+ years later?



But they had demonstrative pronouns, I presume.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> But they had demonstrative pronouns, I presume.


Yes, like all other European languages. What would we learn from that?


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## ahvalj

berndf said:


> Yes, like all other European languages. What would we learn from that?


Well, in principle one can notice that, except Greek, all the other mentioned examples are indeed somehow related to Celts, which inhabited Lusitania, Northern Italy, Southern Germany, Bohemia, were neighbors of Iberians, future Poles (Boii) and Armenians (Galatians), as well as wives and slaves of some western Scandinavians. Many scientific and non-scientific linguistic ideas of the past and present (not to mention many threads on this forum) are no better substantiated. The etymological guesses are especially notorious in this respect. Yet sometimes these assumptions (casually) turn out correct.


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## berndf

ahvalj said:


> Well, in principle one can notice that, except Greek, all the other mentioned examples are indeed somehow related to Celts, which inhabited Lusitania, Northern Italy, Southern Germany, Bohemia, were neighbors of Iberians, future Poles (Boii) and Armenians (Galatians), as well as wives and slaves of some western Scandinavians.


Such a loose definition of "related to Celts" covers something like 60-70% of Europe+Asia Minor. There would be something to it, if use of a determinate or demonstrative marker were known to be typical for continental Celtic language. But even that's not the case. The only logic I can see here is: _We have an obscure phenomenon and continental Celtic is an obscure language [i.e. we know very little about it], so that sounds like a match_. A bit weak, even for a speculative theory.


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## ahvalj

berndf said:


> Such a loose definition of "related to Celts" covers something like 60-70% of Europe+Asia Minor. There would be something to it, if use of a determinate or demonstrative marker were known to be typical for continental Celtic language. But even that's not the case. The only logic I can see here is: _We have an obscure phenomenon and continental Celtic is an obscure language [i.e. we know very little about it], so that sounds like a match_. A bit weak, even for a speculative theory.


I agree of course, but look at the other ideas discussed in parallel threads. Comparative linguistics opens new horizons for many people: everything turns out to be related to everything ,-)


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> Yes, like all other European languages. What would we learn from that?


I   don't know if we can learn anything, but use of demonstrative pronouns with proper nouns can later develop into use of definite articles when they occur in the language that hadn't had any.


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## francisgranada

Hungarian uses the definite article for rivers, but not for towns and countries (except compound names as the United Kingdom, the USA etc.). When used with personal or family names then it concretizes the person. E.g. "Láttam *a* Jánost" (instead of "Láttam Jánost") means that "I'have seen John" - whom we both know, whom we have been speeking about before etc.


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## jmx

Personal given names preceded by an article are common in colloquial Spanish, for instance "El Pedro y la María", though apparently some people regard that as "vulgar". I do say it. Perhaps it is more common in some regions/countries, it's difficult to tell.


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## francisgranada

jmx said:


> Personal given names preceded by an article are common in colloquial Spanish, though apparently some people regard that as "vulgar". I do say it. ...


You use it _consequently,_ i.e. always, or there is some difference? For example "Encontré a la María que estaba hablando con el Pedro cuando llegó el Jaime con la Pepita..."


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## jmx

francisgranada said:


> You use it _consequently,_ i.e. always, or there is some difference? For example "Encontré a la María que estaba hablando con el Pedro cuando llegó el Jaime con la Pepita..."


Since it is a "colloquial" or "vernacular" trait, I don't speak that way all the time. However, the sentence that you propose is indeed possible.


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## francisgranada

jmx said:


> ... However, the sentence that you propose is indeed possible.


Thank you, this is what I wanted to know. A propos, nowadays I notice a similar tendency also in Hungarian, i.e. a redundant colloquial usage of the article with names (including family names), even if it is not the case I've mentioned in my post #26. 

A question: are there any cases (colloquial or not), when the article is used also with family names in Spanish? E.g. el Gonzalez, la Ibárruri, el Cervantes, la Martínez etc ... (in Italian, for example, the article is used in case of women e.g. la Martini, la Rossi, la Thatcher ... )


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## CapnPrep

francisgranada said:


> A propos, nowadays I notice a similar tendency also in Hungarian, i.e. a redundant colloquial usage of the article with names (including family names), even if it is not the case I've mentioned in my post #26.


That's really strange. There must have been a lot of Celtic immigration to Hungary in recent years.


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## jmx

francisgranada said:


> A question: are there any cases (colloquial or not), when the article is used also with family names in Spanish? E.g. el Gonzalez, la Ibárruri, el Cervantes, la Martínez etc ... (in Italian, for example, the article is used in case of women e.g. la Martini, la Rossi, la Thatcher ... )


It is possible, for example in the workplace you usually call those who are not friends by their surnames, so you could speak about "el González", a bit as if it were a nickname. Incidentally, "la Thatcher" or "la Merkel" can be heard quite often in the media.


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## bearded

In Italian, if you only said Merkel without article, it would automatically mean a Mr.Merkel (we are sort of a machist country, also in the language), so the feminine article is added to show that it's a woman.
@ CapnPrep
I really appreciated your irony about Celts and Hungary. It seems that you Americans have acquired a bit of British humour (no offense meant)


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## Nino83

CapnPrep said:


> That's really strange. There must have been a lot of Celtic immigration to Hungary in recent years.



Yes, according to Orban and Jobbik. 



jmx said:


> It is possible, for example in the workplace you usually call those who are not friends by their surnames, so you could speak about "el González", a bit as if it were a nickname. Incidentally, "la Thatcher" or "la Merkel" can be heard quite often in the media.



Well, another similarity between Spanish and Italian. 
What happens in French? Are articles used in colloquial speech before personal names?


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## francisgranada

jmx said:


> It is possible, for example in the workplace you usually call those who are not friends by their surnames, so you could speak about "el González", a bit as if it were a nickname ...


This partially coincides with the "Hungarian logic" in the sense that when speaking about someone known to both the interlocutors, the usage of the article somehow accentuates the "closedness" or "vicinity" of the person. E.g. "el González" is not whoever whose surname is González, but rather "our" González (e.g. our colleague).


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## apmoy70

What's interesting is that in Greek this phenomenon tends to be stretching to extremes in the colloquial language; one hears in informal conversation, *«ο Νίκος ο Παπαδόπουλος»* [o 'nikos o papa'dopulos] => _*The* Nikos *the* Papadopoulos_ (which I personally find appaling). It's not considered standard language, but it's in use (unfortunately).


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## bearded

Hey Apmoy
That Greek feature makes me think that the family name is regarded as an adjective: o Nikos o Papadopoulos like 'o Nikos o Ellinas' or 'Nikos o kalòs'.  Do you feel it in the same way?


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## Kevin Beach

In north Kent, where there is still a strong admix of old East London and old Kentish attitudes and vocabulary among some people who appear not to be very well educated, I have encountered the practice of men referring to other men by "the [name] man".

Usually, the name used is not the precise given name, but a diminutive or nickname, e.g. "the Ginger man", "the Tony man", "the Freddie man" etc.


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## francisgranada

Kevin Beach said:


> ... Usually, the name used is not the precise given name, but a diminutive or nickname, e.g. "the Ginger man", "the Tony man", "the Freddie man" etc.


In Hungarian something similar exists with "boy" or "child": "a Jancsi fiú" (the Johny boy), "a Tóni gyerek" (the Tony child) etc.


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## apmoy70

bearded man said:


> Hey Apmoy
> That Greek feature makes me think that the family name is regarded as an adjective: o Nikos o Papadopoulos like 'o Nikos o Ellinas' or 'Nikos o kalòs'.  Do you feel it in the same way?


You are probably right, it's an inhereted feature from Byzantine Greek. 
It still is rustic and semilingual though.


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## Riverplatense

Ben Jamin said:


> Does anybody know the processes that lead to developing of such a system, or any rules that correlate this phenomenon with other features in the language.



If I have read this thread thoroughly enough, there was no allusion to the fact that articles can mark cases and thus allow to change SVO to OVS, for instance, when the information structure requires this. In fact, in German it would be:

_Die Silvia grüßt den Peter. — Silvia grüßt Peter. _
but
_Den Peter grüßt Silvia. — *Peter grüßt Silvia._

The same goes for Greek, where there's no difference between nom. and acc. in female names, for instance, but it does not go for Portuguese. So I definitely think that's not the whole answer (and I also think there are a number of approaches to this question, anyway), but as I think no clear answer to the initial question was found I wanted to re-open the discussion. Also because the question can be seen from two different sides, I think. When you accept that there are good reasons to have articles with proper names, so why do most IE languages not have them? As other nouns (or rather: actual nouns) are concerned, the field is rather homogeneous. Is it just because names are always definite and so it's more or less all the same if you want to express this definiteness by an article or not ...?


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## Riverplatense

Riverplatense said:


> The same goes for Greek



Of course, that's nonsense — in Ancient Greek you had an accusative ending and still there were articles.


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## djmc

In English one  quite commonly uses the article to indicate someone one knows or should know about. For example:

"Stephen Hawking died last week."
"Who?"
"Stephen Hawking - the Stephen Hawking." The *the* would be emphasised.


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## Riverplatense

djmc said:


> "Stephen Hawking died last week."
> "Who?"
> "Stephen Hawking - the Stephen Hawking." The *the* would be emphasised.



I think it's similar with German, where you'd use it also in order to (also ironically) make sure that you are talking about one specific person: _Paul McCartney ist gekommen. — *Der *Paul McCartney?_ ‹Paul McCartney has come. — _The_ Paul McCartney?›

An interesting facet.


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## bearded

Riverplatense said:


> *Der *Paul McCartney?


I would like to know if you, as a German native speaker, in that expression perceive the word ''der'' still as an article or rather as a demonstrative element, like dieser/jener.  Thank you.


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## berndf

Definitely as an article.


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## bearded

Interesting, berndf.
 In Italian (for French, I am uncertain) we would use a demonstrative: _*Quel *P.McCartney? _How about German ''_Jener _P.McC.?''. Would it sound unidiomatic?


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## berndf

In French, the questions _Quel Paul McCartney ? _and _Le Paul McCartney ? _mean very different things.


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## bearded

berndf said:


> In French, the questions _Quel Paul McCartney ? _and _Le Paul McCartney ? _mean very different things.


Of course.
Our 'quel' is short for 'quello' - before consonants (Fr. quel would be quale in It.). I was/am unsure if French ''_ce _Paul'' or ''_le _Paul'' is more correct.
Please reply to my question, whether in German ''jener Paul?'' instead of ''_der _Paul?'' would not be idiomatic. _Hast du Paul gehört? Den/jenen Paul?
_
To make it clearer: (nominative) _*der(jener?) *Paul? = Fr. le(ce?)Paul? = It. quel Paul?
((welcher Paul? =Fr. quel Paul? =It. quale Paul?))_


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## berndf

bearded said:


> I was/am unsure if French ''_ce _Paul'' or ''_le _Paul'' is more correct.


These mean different things as well.


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## bearded

The difference is not so clear to me. I think that _*ce *Paul/*quel *Paul/*jener *Paul? _could (semantically) correspond to ''the well-known Paul?''.
I am of course certain abt. Italian. Concerning German, am I mistaken?
_Ich bin Angela begegnet. -Jener Angela?_

Pls. read my addition to #9.


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## berndf

bearded said:


> The difference is not so clear to me. I think that _*ce *Paul/*quel *Paul/*jener *Paul? _could (semantically) correspond to ''the well-known Paul?''.
> I am of course certain abt. Italian. Concerning German, am I mistaken?
> _Ich bin Angela begegnet. -Jener Angela?_
> 
> Pls. read my addition to #9.


No, _der Paul McCarney_ would be _the well-known Paul McCarney. _The definite article serves as a uniqueness marker. If you say _dieser Paul McCarney_ (_ce_ is _dieser_ and not _jener_) you imply that there are several _Paul McCarneys_ and none of them does *naturally* stand out. The one you are talking about is singled out only by current context.

If you spoke of the famous Paul McCartney as _dieser Paul McCarney_ it would most likely be understood as pejorative.


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## bearded

OK, thanks.


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## berndf

Here is an example in French where _ce Paul McCartney _is used pejoratively in the way I described it for German:
En lançant ce duo, Kanye West devait s'attendre à toutes sortes de réactions mais sûrement pas à l'incompréhension de quelques fans, surtout les plus jeunes qui ne savaient pas du tout qui était le chanteur posant avec leur idole. Très vite, des messages hilarants ont été publiés sur Twitter : "_Qui est ce Paul McCartney ?? Il va se faire connaître grâce à Kanye !_"​


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## Lugubert

There are cases in Norwegian, that I, a Swede, can't interpret. Article or personal pronoun? A well known song relates to different occasions where a girl is the exception: "_Æille så nær som *a* Ingebjørg"_ - Everybody except I.


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