I thought this was referring to articles as in the part of speech (i.e. there are nouns, verbs, but also article like “a” or “the”) given the title and something spanning across languages… I wonder what his exact thought process was that motivated all that effort?
What I think is wild is that Indo-European languages have developed articles at least four times: in Greek (apparently from a weak demonstrative) with only the definite article, in Romance languages from vulgar Latin with both definite and indefinite articles, distinctly in Romanian where only the definite article exists as an enclitic (suffixed to the noun), and in some, but not all, Germanic languages, perhaps under the influence of vulgar Latin, but I’ve not been able to trace it in my meagre attempts to research the topic.
