fozar> navgar> nauger «auger». word eventually lost its initial n-as a result of what is called metanalysis: the phrase a nauger was, as it were, reinterpreted as an auger, with the intial n-of the substantive apprehended as a final n of the indefinite article.are more examples of this kind of metanalysis. A substantive might either lose or acquire an initial n-. Thus OE ejete «newt» acquired an initial n-owing to a reinterpretation of an ewte as a newte in ME. The ME substantive ekename «additional name», «nickname» also acquired an initial n-: an ekename> a nekename. The ME substantive naperon (from French naperon), on the other hand, lost its initial n-: a naperon> an apron.similar phenomenon is also found in some substantives whose final-s, originally belonging to the stem, was apprehended as a plural ending. Thus, OE жlmesse «alms» (From Lat. Alimosina from Greek eleemosyne «pity») yielded ME alines> MnE alms; ME richesse (from French richesse) yielded MnE riches, apprehended as a plural form; OE byrzels «grave»- ME buriel, MnE burial (it was also influenced by its synonym funeral, of French origin); French cerise, cherise yielded ME and MnE cherry.
In ME an indefinite article arose. As in many other languages, it had its origin in the numeral an «one». First signs of such development were already seen in OE. Then long a in an unstressed position was shortened, and there appeared an unstressed variant an. When the long a changed into long open 9 the numeral became on; the divergence in sound between the stressed and the unstressed form furthered the separation of the article from the numeral.
When on or an was followed by a word beginning with a consonant, the-n was dropped, and there arose the variants o, a. With the numeral, this alternation was later abandoned, and the form on came to be used in all environments. With the indefinite article, the alternation of an and a depending on the initial sound of the following word has been preserved until today.that the word the has its counterpart in the word a (n) it is possible to say that English has an article system represented by two words: a / an and the.OE, as we have seen, an article appeared when the meaning of the demonstrative pronoun was weakened. In this way a new grammatical category within the system of substantives came into being: the category of determination, represented by the opposition: article / absence of article.ME we see a further development in this field: a second article appears here from the OE numeral an. This development must be interpreted as a split in the category of determination, its marked member now splits into two varieties: the definite represented by the article the (from OE se, with substitution of initial s-by th-influenced by other case forms, which were derived from the root p-in OE already). Thus, the whole system of determination may be represented in the following way: 1st opposition: no article (unmarked) vs. article (marked); 2nd opposition: within the second item of the 1st opposition: definite article the vs. indefinite article a (n). The difference between OE and ME in this respect can well be illustrated by comparing the OE examples given above with the following example from Chaucer «s Canterbury Tales, with the same substantive man: was an esy man to yive penaunce» He was an easy man to absolve sins «. the indefinite article a was used in a cont...
