Definite and indefinite articles in E. European languages

Alun

Now, I did Russian at school (many years ago) and remember from that that there are no definite or indefinite articles ('the' or 'a') in Russian. Russians therefore have big problems with this when learning English (or most other W. European languages) and just don't 'get' what they're for, so generally just miss them out altogether.

I've noticed that many other nationalities ... Poles, Czechs, Serbs etc. tend to do the same, so was wondering whether this was a trait shared by all E. European languages? And what about the Baltic states?

hibby

In my experience, many languages are missing indefinite or definite articles. Latin did not have them, although the modern Romance languages do, derived from words meaning "one" and "that (one)". In fact you could argue that it is superfluous to have both - a noun is either definite or indefinite, and if "definite" is the marked condition, there should be no need for an indefinite marker. In other words, in the phrase "a river", the word "a" has no semantic content although it is required by English grammar. Small wonder non-native learners don't always "get it".

Swedish (and probably the other Scandinavian languages) usually uses an "n" or "t" ending to give an attribute of "definiteness" to a noun. The exception is if an adjective is used, in which case the words "den" or "det" are used in the role of "the". Interestingly, at least one Slavic language, Bulgarian, uses a similar method.

Lithuanian has no indefinite or definite articles, but it does have definite adjectives. These adjective forms fill roughly the same purpose as "the" in English - i.e. identifying a particular example of a class of objects by situational or linguistic reference. So "maža upė" means "a small river" but "mažoji upė" means "the small river" (approximately).