Expert: Kurt Bamert - 2/20/2006

Question
How come articles in German and in Spanish (as well as other romance languages) have a designated gender?  In the Spanish language, there's "el" and "la" (masculine and feminine, respectively) and in German, there's der, die, and das (masculine, feminine, and neuter).

However, in the English language, there's the word "the."  It doesn't have a specific gender assigned to it.

I have studied Spanish and I'm currently working on German.  I'm just curious as to why there's no gender-designated articles in English but there are in German (a Germanic language related to English) and Spanish.  

From,

Shannon

Answer
The, the English grammatical article
Main article: The

The word the functions primarily as the definite grammatical article in English.

The and that are common developments from the same Old English system. Old English had a definite article se, in the masculine gender, seo, feminine, and þæt, neuter. These words functioned both as demonstrative pronouns and as grammatical articles. In Middle English these had all fallen together into þe, the ancestor of the Modern English word.

Because the word the is common in movie and book titles, they are placed invertedly, such as Grudge, The, for convenience when looking for a title.
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In the history of many languages, definite articles formerly were demonstrative pronouns or adjectives; compare the evolution of the Latin demonstrative ille in the Romance languages, becoming French le, Spanish el, and Italian il, while indefinite articles originate or are same as the numeral for one.
source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)

Der bestimmte Artikel ist aus einem Demonstrativpronomen entstanden, der unbestimmte aus einem Zahlwort, ahd. heiligemo geiste: mhd. dem heiligen geiste.

http://www.ff.ukf.sk/kger/Publikationen/Grammatik/sprachgeschichte.pdf