A Contrastive Analysis of the English Articles and Their Equivalents in German, French and Yoruba

Abstract

Language can be seen a a system of words or signs used either in the past or present for the primary purpose of communication. Human language can either be written or spoken and there is said to be well over 6,000 living languages in the world. These can also be classified under different umbrellas according to their roots of derivations and their evolution. For example, German and English come from the Germanic family languages. The German language is from the West Germanic family of language, while the English language is from the East Germanic language. The French language on the other hand, is a descendant of Latin and one of the Romance langauges where we have Italian and Spanish, while Yoruba is classified as a Niger-Congo language. All these languages have gone through years of reform and restructuring before becoming what we now refer to as standard German, French, English, or Yoruba today.