Just curious, who were the geniuses who came up with the definite article? I’ve heard that Greek was among the first of the Indo-European languages, but I know that Hebrew had a definite article presumably before that since Moses wrote the Pentateuch around 1500 B.C.
Geniuses, you said? Hmm.. Sometimes I think that if I had a time machine, I would’ve done my best to have them crucified. 
PS: No offence, just note from speaker of other language.
Well, there seems to be something humans find useful about definiteness, and ways to represent it in language develop fairly easily. So we see the article develop independently from demonstrative pronouns, as in Greek (i.e. in Homer the article is really ‘this, that’) and the Romance languages from Latin. The Coptic article comes from Middle Egyptian demonstratives.
Even when a language doesn’t have a definite article it might have other ways to express definiteness. For example, in Hungarian there are two separate conjugation systems for transitive verbs: one for when the object is definite, one for when it is not. (Hungarian also has an article, though). Also, Persian has a suffixed particle, effectively a conjugation ending, that indicates a definite direct object; when the direct object is indefinite it is unmarked.
There’s no one group we can blame.
Thanks for the interesting info! 
On a related note, I think that because the Romans didn’t use the definite article, they invented all these abstract nouns which passed into English through French and made literary English too abstract compared with literary Greek. It’s one of the reasons I like Greek, although it is true that the Greeks started inventing a lot of abstract nouns themselves in -ikos and the like in the fifth and fourth centuries.
(Now that I’m using NaturallySpeaking to dictate instead of type, it’s properly capitalising and punctuating my posts here: it looks so formal and unfriendly)
Formal and unfriendly? nonsense! I couldn’t be further from the truth.
Could you elaborate on the concept of abstract nouns in literary language?
Hi, see the quote by Sidgwick on the first page of this link:
http://www.aoidoi.org/articles/meter/WritingIambics.pdf
Also, Professor Harris refers to this general point in the section titled “The verb” here:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/GreekGrammar.html
I see it especially in legal and philosophical texts in English. I think the term is periphrasis but I could be wrong: in literary English, you’ll see “give an explanation for” at least as often as “explain”, i.e. using a verb plus noun plus preposition instead of a plain verb. Once again, the Greeks did use periphrasis, it’s not black-and-white.
Fascinating! Thank you very much.
I’m not so sure Latin was as abstract as we think. It’s true that romance words in English on the whole are more abstract, but this may be a side-effect of our borrowing habits. We tend to adopt foreign words when describing abstract concepts, or new inventions. No need to invent words for well-known, everyday objects, since English already has them. Latin only seems abstract to us. Often the original roots connote something much more concrete than our borrowed words.
But I am no linguist, so what do I know.
One of the best recent books I’ve read on Greek is a book called The Languages of Aristophanes by Andreas Willi (OUP, 2002). It discusses synchronic and diachronic elements of Aristophanes’ language and contains “A Grammar of Aristophanes’ Attic” as an appendix that deals with a lot of grammatical issues that have bearing on any text written in Attic.
I cite it because it has a chapter titled “Sophistic Innovations” in which this exact kind of linguistic phenomenon is discussed under two headings, “Nominalization” (the derivation of nouns from another word) and “Typicalisation” (which includes periphrasis that you mentioned).
Typicalisation is a bit more complicated than periphrasis and involves restating something with a loss of various grammatical categories. For instance: γράφει conveys mood, aspect, tense, voice, and person whereas γραφεύς conveys much less. Compare the sentence σωκράτης γράφει γῆς περίοδον “Socrates is drawing a world map” with σωκράτης γῆς περιόδου γραφεύς ἐστι. The former describes a specific accent in the present, but the latter only says that Socrates belongs to a type.
Willi goes on to talk about various related processes: the creation of verbal compounds in -έω, the so-called ‘resultative’ perfect, verbal nouns in -σις, in -μα, adjectives in -ικός, verbal adjectives in -τέος and their accelerated growth in classical Attic during the second half the 5th century, linked with the emergence of a sophistic culture.
I’d be hard pressed to summarize it, so if you’re interested, I highly recommend you get a hold of a copy.
Hi, that’s a total coincidence that you mention The Languages of Aristophanes, I just read it cover to cover about a month ago and was thinking of that when I mentioned the -ikos (and others) abstract nouns in Greek above
Now i’m no linguist, nor psycho-anything, so this is just some ignoramus building pretty castles in the air (and not understanding long words like “periphrasis”): but isn’t the purported “ease” with which “definiteness” develops simply another reflection of one of the basic methods of operation of the human mind - that of specialisation versus generalisation? i find the parallel with the definite/indefinite article inescapable.
Pursuing similar themes i find the leap from the demonstrative “this” or “that” to the definite and indefinite article an enormous leap from the concrete into the abstract. Could this really also be something to do with the way the brain works? Or is it something cultural at a very low level? Perhaps the “primitive mind” (whatever that actually means) simply has no cultural necessity of making this distinction.
Something i’m really feeling the lack of here is the linguistic element - i’m most definitely on the low rungs of the Latin ladder and have no other language than my native English.
Does anyone have any anthropological evidence here or is this more along the lines of “psycho-archaeology”?
Or am i just talking crap? (Don’t all shout at once.)
I think you’re overanalyzing this a bit. Grammatical definiteness has sound pragmatic use (i.e., that lion over there, the one in front of you, is going to eat you vs. lions eat people). I’m not sure more exalted faculties are necessarily involved. Lots of languages get along fine without grammatical definiteness.
Pursuing similar themes i find the leap from the demonstrative “this” or “that” to the definite and indefinite article an enormous leap from the concrete into the abstract.
Definite articles develop from demonstratives. The only languages I know with actual indefinite articles are in the western European Sprachbund[1], and they all grabbed the numberal “one” for that.
[1] Sprachbund - a language region. For some reason when languages live close together, they tend to swap features. There doesn’t need to be very much bilingualism for this to happen, nor do the languages need to be related. It’s a funky thing. It’s why a bunch of distantly related languages in Europe change transitiveness with reflexives - an unusual way to go about it - je me lave, ich dusche mich, me llavo, etc.
Palmer also discusses this in The Greek Language, though probably not in the same detail.
Modern Greek has an indefinite article. (It also grabbed the numeral "one’ for that.