Why latin based languages has articles? I found it is totally unnecessary what you think?

Question

My mother language is Turkish and we don`t have articles like Spanish el/la or French le/la or German der/die/das in our language and we perfectly understand eachothers, it comes to me extremely stupid to use adjectives and adverbs as female or male by adding additional letters or changing their sonuds when we read. I really hate all Latin based languages and it is of course more difficult for people to learn coming from other cultures. Example a Turkish man/woman can learn English in 6 months by studying 3 hrs a day, but can not learn French/Spanish/Italian/German in the same period and even Latin languages with such articles feminin/masculine creates a lot of mistakes when you use the language, irregular verbs and tenses are completely a problem. I wonder what they think Language Professors in the world why they don`t act against to articles. Of course I respect to culture this and that but that is why all around the world English language is most used and people trying to learn.

Answer 1

Hi, well all languages have some form of particles, even Turkish! If you understand articles or other particles are used to distinguish between something which is concrete and something inconcrete, something familiar vs. unfamiliar, also a way to define and quantify. Turkish does not have articles in the same way that maybe other languages do but you have endless particles i.e. suffixes or particles that you added on to the word to fulfill the exact same functions than articles do but with much more complex laws. In fact Latin originally had no articles either since it used declinations to fulfill the functions much the same than Turkish has, which is no wonder since supposedly Latin comes ultimately from Troy - Aeneas and all that stuff, which as you probably know was in Turkey.... So your performance with Latin based languages I think is more related to your motivation -you hate them- than the difficulty of the languages themselves.

Best

Santiago

Answer 2

Your very long question used articles several times (articles being "a", "an", and "the"):

A Turkish man/woman
3 hrs A day
THE same period
A lot of mistakes
useTHE language
Professors in THE world
all around THE world

And in one place where you should have used THE, you used TO: Of course I respect to culture

I will grant you that English is a difficult language to learn, but the article adjectives are the least of it's problems.

Besides, I believe English is more Germanic than Latin, despite its heavy dependence on Latin word roots.

I won't criticize because you know this language well enough to communicate, and I certainly can't return the favor in your language.

But you probably need to go with the flow.

Answer 3

I really don't know either. Especially because Latin doesn't have any articles.
It's always been confusing to me that languages based on Latin all have articles, but Latin doesn't - maybe it's b/c they found it easier to use an article than to specify "one" before singular items?

Answer 4

Is it articles that you disagree with or genders ?

English has articles, too - the, a