Peter Backhaus in the Japan Times reports on a truly bizarre phenomenon:
If there’s something like a Murphy’s Law for syntax, the name of this restaurant near my school is a pretty good example of it. Reading “Steak The First,” it always makes me wonder how these three words came to be aligned in just that order. “The first steak,” “first the steak,” “the steak first” — all of these seem safe for consumption. But “steak the first”?
In order to understand what’s going on here, we need to appreciate the very specific way the little word “the” is used in Japanese, where it is normally pronounced ザ (za). Note that the reading may change to ジ (ji) when the following word starts with a vowel, as in the name of the invincible Japanese rock band The Alfee, which officially reads ジ・アルフィー (ji arufī).
But since Japanese is a language that normally gets along perfectly well without articles, it’s a bit challenging to understand what use it can make of ザ in the first place. Even more puzzling is that, more often than not, ザ shows up in places where English syntax wouldn’t want you to put an article at all. […]
ザ specialist Ayako Kajiwara, a linguist at Nagoya University, has collected a larger number of ザ expressions to flesh out the underlying rules of usage. One of the chief functions she identifies for ザ is to spotlight some sort of prototypicality in the word it is paired up with.
Take the phrase ザ・月曜日 (za getsuyōbi, “the” Monday). When someone says this to you, they do not simply want to inform you about the day of the week. What this means is it’s one of those miserable, most Monday-like Monday mornings that really have it in for you. Think sick kids, torrential rainfalls, train delays, etc.
Another example, from my own collection of ザ cases: A Japanese friend who had just changed jobs complained to me that the new work environment was really ザ・会社 (za kaisha, “the” company). Which was to say it was full of red tape, opaque procedures, cemented hierarchies and everything else one commonly associates with the unpleasant aspects of corporate life.
The stereotyping capacities of ザ also come to the fore when pigeonholing people. ザ・お嬢様 (Za o-jōsama, “The” Miss Princess), for instance, can be used to characterize someone who’s perceived as excessively posh, and ザ・サラリーマン (za sararīman, “the” salaryman) is for people who are, well, extraordinarily ordinarily salaryman-like.
But ザ also does a great job in extracting positive stereotypes. Two examples from Kajiwara’s data are ザ・トマト (za tomato, “the” tomato) and ザ・和食 (za washoku, “the” Japanese cuisine). The first one designates a particularly “tomatoic” specimen of the fruit, in terms of color, taste, juiciness, what have you, while the second evokes a textbook example of a classic Japanese meal. The washoku that out-washokus all others.
ザ’s power to highlight positive attributes may also be a factor in its frequent occurrence in commercial contexts, where we find (mostly romanized) phrases like “The Bargain” or “The Price Down.” And ザ also goes with adjectives, as in “The Strong,” which is a sparkling water brand, or “The Main,” referring to the central part of a well-known hotel complex in inner-city Tokyo. Seen in this light, our “Steak The First” from the opening now starts to make some sense, too. […]
What “the” Japanese did, then, when importing the article, was not inventing something entirely new, but stripping it down to one or two of a greater number of tasks that the word normally does in English. We know this process of semantic narrowing, as it is called, from tons of imports of lexical items, such as ライス (raisu, rice), which refers only to cooked rice on flat plates, and ミルク (miruku, milk), normally meaning condensed milk only.
The difference, and what perhaps makes this all a bit more difficult to swallow, is that in the case of ザ, we are witnessing the semantic narrowing of an expression originally from the domain of grammar, and thus somewhat closer to the heart. But there’s nothing the Japanese language can’t swallow when eating its way through the English language. Not even the “the.”
I thought I’d seen it all, but that boggles my mind. (Via the Log.)
I’ve long had on my phone a nice app called Za Hanafuda ザ・花札.
I particularly like it because it has an idiot setting where I stand some chance of actually winning.
Hanafuda, for those as ignorant as I.
Being totally ignorant of Japanese, it wasn’t until the end of the extract that I realised za is a loanword from English the, as opposed to the native Japanese definite article. Before which point I was furrowing my brow and inwardly asking what was so weird about any of this.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/la#Etymology_4 :
“Following lukewarm on the heels of an article a few weeks ago, where (I paraphrase due to having filed the relevant copy in the recycling bin) Victoria Beckham made a “well-meaning” remark that the other Spice Girls might want to lose a few pounds, we now have a new incidence of La Beckham’s scintillating and entirely well-meaning humour.”
@molly: Being totally ignorant of Japanese, it wasn’t until the end of the extract that I realised za is a loanword from English the, as opposed to the native Japanese definite article.
I am equally toadally, yet I did not miss the remark “… since Japanese is a language that normally gets along perfectly well without articles …”, about halfway down the extract.
What a contrast ! The English have 39 Articles.
Hanafuda video games were a “traditional” fixture of adult arcades, meaning you got to see pixel art of naked ladies if you won a hand.
Hmph. My app does not provide this feature. I may need to contact the developers.
I misinterpreted “since Japanese is a language that normally gets along perfectly well without articles” as meaning that zero article was the default/unmarked. I guess I was already so invested in my incorrect initial assumption that I tried to warp later statements to fit, until that became so hard that a wholesale rethink was impelled.
This usage of ザ from English the seems somehow related to the adoption of マイ from English my to mark prestige items of personal property, as in マイカー my car, which dates from the 1960s, when more Japanese began acquiring private vehicles, and more recently マイホーム my home for private residences. (I’m not sure whether the latter applies to condominium apartments.)
The more traditional way to indicate ‘private’ or ‘personal’ is to add the character 私 watakushi ‘I, me’ but pronounced shi in Sino-Japanese compounds such as 私物 shibutsu (lit. me-things) ‘personal effects’ or 私財 shizai (lit. me-materials) ‘private property’. (Chinese for ‘private vehicle’ is 私車 or simplified 私车.)
I guess I was already so invested in my incorrect initial assumption that I tried to warp later statements to fit, until that became so hard that a wholesale rethink was impelled.
We’ve all been there…
In English, “ADJ the NOUN” is AFAIK never a permissible internal structure for a NP, at least outside of poetry,* not even as a marked deviation for rhetorical effect from the unmarked default word order. One possible** instance of the construction in English is the title of Annie Dillard’s 1977 book “Holy the Firm.” I’ve always assumed w/o actually confirming that the title was influenced by the acceptable-in-the-relevant-type-of-Greek word order of “Ἅγιος ὁ Θεός,” but I guess I’m not 100% sure of that.
*Even in poetry, if I saw a wording like “green the tree,” I would probably take it as a “poetic license” inversion of “the tree is green” with the copula deleted, not an inversion of “the green tree.”
**I say “possible” because maybe the title isn’t a NP at all but an inversion of a NP+predicate of the sort described in the prior footnote.
My exposure to teenagers who watch more anime than me made one example spring to mind: the kids all know something about “ZA WARUDO!” which may be recognizable to English speakers as “The World” (specifically in its function as the twenty-first Major Arcanum of the tarot.)
I’m amused to hear that “za” probably makes it sound even more dramatically overwrought than I was assuming.
I noticed “the” has been borrowed as both ji and za, where in English it’s always /ðiː/ in this sense. But now I feel like I’ve heard stressed “the” as /ðʌ/ before exemplars. Could it be regional,
or am I just misremembering? It’s not something I hear anyone use unselfconsciously very often.
Winnie the Pooh (as impatiently explained to his father by Christopher Robin*) is /ðə/ for me. Though in general I too would say /ði/ in that kind of usage. But Winnie ði Pooh would imply that, in principle; there might be alternative Poohs. Which is absurd. There can be only One.(Canonically, Christopher Lambert, of course.)
* “Don’t you know what ‘the’ means?”
Isn’t the meaning “the real deal” also in Hawaiian “da kine”?
@J.W. Brewer:
Neither a linguist nor a native speaker here, but “first the steak” scans as “ADV the NOUN.” There exists a First the Seed Foundation “established in 2008 by the American Seed Trade Association,” which I suppose isn’t a seditious hive of non-native speakers.
Having said this, “Steak the first” also scans to me as King Steak. I sympathize with the Japanese for enthroning King Steak rather than the restaurateur as Steak King.
Good point with Winnie-the-Pooh. In epithets in general, “the” won’t be stressed /ðiː/.
“Did you just say ‘Alexander is great?'”
“No, I said ‘Alexander /ðʌ/ Great!'”
I always hear Megan Thee Stallion with a /ðə/, despite what you would think. My hip-hop head roommate says both are acceptable, but “people don’t have the energy to put in the full /ðiː/.”
Now I’m imagining possible scenarios:
“You won a radio call-in contest to meet Megan Thee Stallion? /ðiːː/ Megan Thee Stallion?!”
1-The phenomenon described by Peter Backhaus is not especially new: the borrowing of English “the” as “za” (though this is the first time that I read about a “ji” allomorph) into Japanese was mentioned by Christopher Beckwith in his 2004 book (KOGURYO: THE LANGUAGE OF JAPAN’S CONTINENTAL RELATIVES, Brill (Brill’s Japanese Studies library, volume 21)): on page 224, to be precise, where he mentions its being rampant in spoken Japanese and of having noticed, in the Kansai area in 1996, a Domburi restaurant bearing the name “Za domburi”, i.e. “THE (place) for Domburi”.
(Yes, I do obsessively read all about historical linguistics, even when it involves languages + cultures I know next to nothing about, how in the world did you guess? I suspect a majority of people on Earth who suffer from this peculiar addiction are readers of this site, so I suppose I can be honest about it…)
2-As a former teacher of English to francophones, I can assure hatters that teaching the distribution of allomorphs of the articles did a good job of destroying the illusion that English is a simple language.
“I guess I was already so invested in my incorrect initial assumption. …”
1. I wondered whether it is English “the” or an entirely different Japanese thing.
2. for some reason za and ji made me think it might be the later.
3. for some reason “gets along perfectly well without articles” made me think it might be the former (but I don’t think it follows logically)
4. I re-read it, and kept reading the article thinking that it must be a Japanese thing. (Though… It was surprising. I expected English, but the text convinced me it is Japanese)
5. I couldn’t understand this:
“The difference, and what perhaps makes this all a bit more difficult to swallow, is that in the case of ザ, we are witnessing the semantic narrowing of an expression originally from the domain of grammar, and thus somewhat closer to the heart. ”
Then I read this. ‘But there’s nothing the Japanese language can’t swallow when eating its way through the English language. Not even the “the.”‘
Then I realised it is English “the”.
Then it occured to me that za sounds like “the”.
Then I understood the line that I could not understand.
Then I re-read (3) with this new meaning.
And then I read ‘“the” is used in Japanese, where it is normally pronounced ザ (za).‘ and realised that it does hint that ザ is English “the”.
I think what confused me was that I expected the author to say it’s a borrowing if it’s a borrowing.
The silence convinced me it is not… even though I expected it to be a borrowing.
I’m prepared to guess that borrowing of articles is cross-linguistically rare …
Though that doesn’t seem completely accurate as a statement of what Japanese has actually done here. It’s perhaps more like English “bringing parliament into disrepute à la Boris Johnson” or “travelling to Swansea via Hartlepool.” The sort of thing that’s meat and drink to the Constructiion Grarmmar people. Japanese has borrowed a construction from English here.
Folks here would probably be interested to know about a long-running Japanese manga/light novel/anime series called “Read or Die”, whose protagonist is an agent known as “The Paper” (ザ・ペーパー, Za Pēpā) working for the immensely powerful and highly secret special operations division of the British Library.
A while back, during one of the Tokyo elections, there was an ad against the Ishihara campaign with the slogan 『ストップ・ザ・石原』(Stop the Ishihara), which, I imagine would be something like “Stop the Ishihara Administration” in English. I’ve seen that 『ストップ・ザ』 construction used quite often. Off the top of my head, I recall anti-drug, anti-gun, anti-yakuza campaigns using this. Sometimes this can be a bit confusing for a native English speakers, as in ストップザシーズンインザサン (stop the season in the sun), which I first imagined to be an irrational hatred of a pop song from the 1970s, but apparently means I want summer to last forever.
“Though that doesn’t seem completely accurate as a statement of what Japanese has actually done here.”
Yes. I would say it is more like what English speakers do to la (while “via” and “à la” sound to me more like proper borrowings. The later maybe because it’s a part of my Russian idiolect, it is not that common in English, unlike “via”). It is strange that no one plays with al- (perhaps in Arabic contexts). It’s among the most famous Arabic words…
“Read or Die” is indeed wonderful. In-universe, it actually makes sense that the British Library would be the most feared and powerful organisation in the world. (I like the fact that the variously superpowered characters are all in awe of a character with no uncanny powers at all, on the grounds that she is an author. Again, makes perfect sense in-universe.)
When I googled マイホーム (MyHome), the anime series マイホームヒーロー “My Home Hero” (alas, not My Home Hilo) dominated my search results, followed by a homebuilder’s site soliciting customers wanting to design their own MyHomes.
When we visited my brother in Kentucky last month, he wore a shirt that said ケンタッキーの我が家 ‘Kentucky no wa ga ie’ [lit. Kentakkii GEN me GEN house] which is the standard translation of ‘My [Old] Kentucky Home’. (He was born in Kyoto and came of age in Hiroshima, but has spent most of his life in Kentucky.) Don’t the Japanese and the English phrasings both imply the possible existence of other Old Homes besides Kentucky?
My feeling on this is that the original Japan Times article gives a rather exaggerated impression of how widespread this construction is in normal, spoken Japanese. In fact, in more than 30 years of using the language, I’m not sure I’ve *ever* heard a Japanese person use “za” or any other version of the English definite article in a spoken Japanese sentence. The examples cited in the article all sound to me like Japanese speakers using (with an English speaker) a self-conscious, ad hoc borrowing from English, humorously intended to bring out, as the author suggests, something of the force of the sense of “typical, paradigmatic example of Noun A,” which is one of the uses of the definite article that Japanese students learn in English classes. It would be a big stretch to describe this as a usage that has entered everyday Japanese, I think.
The use in advertising and signage *is* quite widespread and (I would say) haphazard. The articles are such a well-known (and notoriously difficult) aspect of English that they’re an easy way to give an exotically “international” flavor to a phrase, in the same way that English-speakers with little or no French or Spanish might try to convey a sense of those languages by using “los” or “la” or “el” instead of plain old “the.” As another commentator mentioned, the “Stop za xx” pattern is one that seems to be particularly well established. “Stop za eiga dorobo (movie thief)” is a short film warning against copyright infringement that plays before a movie starts in the cinema, for example.
@drasvi: “La Beckham” probably owes its existence to Italian opera and/or the Italianate operatic tradition with its diva worship. La Callas, La Tebaldi, etc.
@Dusty: “But now I feel like I’ve heard stressed “the” as /ðʌ/ before exemplars.” I’ve heard it more than once and have always assumed it’s an American innovation.
The definition in Wiktionary is
“From French la, Italian la.
Prefixed to the name of a woman, with ironic effect (as though an opera prima donna).”
And, of course https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/le#Etymology_1 (le girlfriend, le waitress).
On the other hand, I hardly ever saw ザ. I don’t know Japanese, but I suspect that even if ザ is more common than le/la, it must be what Tomoda Ginzo said…. except that he knows it, and I merely suspect it.
I found “Steak The First” an absolutely transparent construction (being L2 helps, the shouldn’t be capitalized). It’s like William the First. Obviously, Will I is better than Will II. Same is for the stakes, the first is the best. The fact that it is not what Japanese speakers really mean (maybe a bit) doesn’t bother me at all, I am L∞ in Japanese.
L∞
The counting system “one, two, three, many”.
Or zero, one, two, ℵ-zero, ℵ-one, ℵ-two…
The similarity to “my” in マイカー that Joel mentioned also sprang immediately to my mind. But did you know that you can combine both, as in the car magazine ザ・マイカー “The My Car”, published from 1995 to 2020?
https://www.fujisan.co.jp/product/1059/
I personally agree with Giacomo Ponzetto and D.O. here – to my own L2-English sensibility, at least in a restaurant-name context, “Steak The First” is a fairly cromulent construction attributing royalty to the steak, like Sir Loin but stronger. It’s not normal English but restaurant names are not really supposed to be normal English in the first place.
That said, I do have to admit that borrowing an article is probably very unusual.
This specific function sounds like a fairly prominent function of the definite article, though, so I kind of understand how it could have been borrowed; cf. Volkswagen Das Auto (or, as I’ve always heard it in the ads, Das Automo).
I can add my impression to Giacomo, D.O., and January’s. I’m a native English speaker, and initially took it as a playful personification of the steak as royalty. It was fascinating to find out that this is not remotely what was intended (though it make the first paragraph did read oddly to me, since this perfectly valid ordering was being dismissed as the one impossible configuration).
I guess if the type-example here had been some other adjective than an ordinal, this misdirection probably wouldn’t have happened.
My instinctive reaction is “yes, steak him!”, but I’m the least competent speaker here and it wasn’t serious anyway.
“The Ohio State University” ™, with its emphatic “THE!!!” meaning “the one and only, accept no imitations”, seems to be similar.
“In English, “ADJ the NOUN” is AFAIK never a permissible internal structure for a NP, at least outside of poetry,* not even as a marked deviation for rhetorical effect from the unmarked default word order. One possible** instance of the construction in English is the title of Annie Dillard’s 1977 book “Holy the Firm.” I’ve always assumed w/o actually confirming that the title was influenced by the acceptable-in-the-relevant-type-of-Greek word order of “Ἅγιος ὁ Θεός,” but I guess I’m not 100% sure of that. ”
That may have been an allusion to “Happy the Home When God is There” (1846 hymn, Henry Ware, USA).
https://hymnary.org/text/happy_the_home_when_god_is_there_and_lov
(yes, the URL cuts off at “lov”)
Since of course “Steak the First” is “NOUN the ADJ,” my upthread observations on “ADJ the NOUN” are, I suppose, an irrelevant digression. But, to be clear, “first the seed” is not a NP. It is not synonymous with “the first seed” (which “seed the first” might be in a pseudo-royal construction), but almost certainly means something like “first, VERB the seed,” with the relevant VERB being at least loosely implied by context and “first” actually being in context an adverb rather than adjective. Thus, e.g., a random book title from 2012 I googled up: “First the Organization, Then the Money: Getting Smart About Getting Grants.”
Adjective THE Noun is typical in Irish proverbs:
https://daltai.com/proverbs/material-things/food-and-drink/is-maith-an-t-anlann-an-t-ocras/
The royal “NOUN the ADJ” is not limited to ordinal ADJ
@David Eddyshaw: You have correctly quoted Christopher Robin, but ever-so-slightly misquoted his father’s quote of Christopher Robin. This is possible because while the first version was spoken, the second was written, and so it specified some orthographic elements that were not previously fixed. I mention this because what you missed was precisely the specification of the vowel you were otherwise discussing (although in the standardly inept posh English fashion):
@Alex K., drasvi: That way of addressing Posh (speaking of) seems particularly apt, for a couple reasons. Although not an opera singer, she was indeed a singer and acting like an obnoxious diva, seemingly passive aggressively joking that the other Spice Girls should lose weight. Referring to her by just her last name, in a way that calls attention to itself, also helps jam home the point that she was perceived as deciding she was too good for her bandmates after she married David Beckham.
mollymooly, I didn’t mean to imply any limitation, just that the ordinals are so iconic that they steer this interpretation in a way ‘the bad’ or ‘the bear’ wouldn’t (I suspect, at least). Not that such epithets are particularly marked for royalty: Erik the Red, John the Fearless, the completely inaccurate Joan the Lame, etc.
According to Dillard, IIRC, “Holy the Firm” is a term in Kabbalah for the foundation of existence. It’s in the book.
Rodger C.: Well, Kabbalah is not traditionally written in English. So who would have Englished what underlying Hebrew phrase with that rather peculiar syntax in the output, and why?
Although google books reveals the following (supposedly said by Gurdjieff, as related by Ouspensky in a work apparently first published in 1949 although I was looking at a 1957 printing in the google books corpus):
“You know the prayer ‘Holy God, Holy the Firm, Holy the Immortal’? This prayer comes from ancient knowledge. Holy God means the Absolute or All. Holy the Firm also means the Absolute or Nothing. Holy the Immortal signifies that which is between them, that is, the six notes of the ray of creation, with organic life.”
Problems: First, the Gurdjieff discourse was presumably not delivered in English. I take it that Ouspensky himself wrote in English toward the end of his life but it was not his L1. Second, “Holy the Firm” is a totally bonkers translation of Ἅγιος ἰσχυρός, or (AFAIK) of Свѧты́й Крѣ́пкый, or of սուրբ եւ հզօր, to give the standard liturgical forms in three different languages where Gurdjieff himself might have been acquainted with it. The usual English renderings of the second adjective are “strong” or “mighty.”
Gurdjieff’s English is basically word for word Something Else.
And The University of Iowa and a ton of others.
At the pinnacle of this, there are English titles that start with “The Honourable The”.
Averted, as TV Tropes would say, by the Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Cambridge UP website consistently renders this as Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh, because The Royal Society is just that important, but the journal itself never does, neither on its title pages displayed on the website nor in its articles.
Yes, but that’s two sentences: “Volkswagen. Das Auto.”
what
David M.: the usual patterns in American English for universities named for toponyms are arthrous “the University of Toponym” versus anarthrous “Toponym University” or “Toponym State [or “Technical” or “Agricultural and Mechanical” etc etc.] University.” That’s what makes Ohio State’s official insistence on the definite article peculiar.
I’m talking about capitalization of the article, not its mere presence. “The” is part of the name of The University of Iowa, as opposed to “the University of Iowa”.
I don’t know what “part of the name” means. Is this like arguing about whether the name of the band is “the Rolling Stones” or the name is actually “Rolling Stones” but just happens to be conventionally preceded by a definite article (except in certain fairly well-defined syntactic contexts) when referred to by L1 Anglophones?
I think universities conventionally referred to as “the University of Toponym” have varying institutional practices when it comes including/excluding the “the” on letterhead or business cards or whatnot. I don’t know that that’s particularly informative. If some of them insist on capitalizing the “the” in contexts where it conventionally would not be capitalized, that doesn’t tell you anything either, other than that some people have too much time on their hands. Why not capitalize the “of”? Isn’t it “part of the name”? But that’s not how the relevant capitalization conventions work, that’s why not.
J.W. Brewer: Well, that’s interesting. Possibly either Dillard was wrong or I remember her inaccurately–unfortunately I don’t own the book. She claims something of the sort, though.
My various academic employers (except Indiana University, which never gets a “the” at all) have all be fairly consistent about treating “the” as not officially part of their names. For example, this Web page is titled: “About Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory,” although in the body text they have no issue with referring to “the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory” (or its parent organization, “the Smithsonian Institution”). The SAO (starting the abbreviation with “Smithsonian”) is part of a joint venture, previously known as “the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,”* more recently known as “the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian” or “CfA.”
* Since we are talking about the organization’s own preferred orthography, I have left the N-dash here, even though I would punctuate the name with a shorter hyphen myself.
Some entities include the initial article in their official initialism: The National Archives TNA, An Bord Pleanála ABP. And the logo for La Liga is a stylized LL.
The Players Championship is unofficially TPC and played at “TPC at Sawgrass” but the latter stands for Tournament Players Club and the former’s initials ceased to be official when it changed from Tournament Players Championship. I suspect the The is fastidiously capitalised to ensure the unofficial initialism still works
I don’t know about the Hebrew, or that particular phrase as a translation of Hebrew, but for me “Holy the Firm” strikes me as not a noun phrase, but as an adjective and a separate noun phrase, equivalent to “holy is/are the firm (one/ones)”
Same for “Happy the Home When God is There”. “Happy” is not a part of the noun phrase with “the home”.
i think the opera-queen “La Such-and-such” feels closer to the description of “za” than anything else i can come up with in english, especially in its oldschool gay extension beyond the divas. (in the post-human world with a lot of radioactivity of delany’s Einstein Intersection, La/Lo/Le are gendered honorifics indicating comparatively-standard-human status, which are out of use in the cities except as a class-based status marker.)
no opinions or knowledge about dillard or her novel, but i just spent a moment trying to extrapolate based on some knowledge of kabbalism but minimal hebrew. it sounds like she’s saying it’s a phrase glossing “yesod”, the second sfira from the bottom of the tree, but i don’t know my luria well enough to have a clue of what that phrase could be. if it’s a direct translation, presumably “kadosh ha-something”? but it seems much more likely that it’s pure gurdjieff, that he or ouspensky decided to call kabbalistic for reasons unrelated to its source.
rozele: I suspect you’re right.
I missed this thread when it started. I don’t have a lot to add. This usage sounds familiar and natural to me, so much so that I barely noticed it.
There is one point that is easily overlooked: exactly how was this borrowed into Japanese? There are always several possible routes. One is absorbing language from listening to foreigners speaking, either in the flesh or through the media. One example from the Meiji period is the word kameya meaning “dog”, from hearing foreigners saying “Come here!”. Another is through reading (which covers a variety of situations), such as the adoption of the word manshon (apartment) from seeing “xxx Manshions” in the names of buildings in London and elsewhere.
I would attribute ザ (za) to the educational system, that is the teaching of English in high schools and universities. The definite article is hard enough to master as it is, and boiling it down to a simplified version as marking a “prototypical” case (e.g., “the dog is man’s best friend” — note that this usage is far more common in written English than in spoken English) does not seem surprising.
On the other hand, expressions like Sutoppu za Ishizawa look to me like a direct borrowing from English usage, e.g., “Stop the dam!” or “Ban the bomb!”, rather than a direct extrapolation from grammar rules taught in schools. (Of course this borrowing presupposes familiarity with school grammar, but the route of entry is, I would suggest, the reason that this rather curious locution has arisen.)
I thought about something similar in context of the question of how common it can be cross-linguistically.
I thought it is a literate borrowing. Else I expect articles borrowed together with words they accompany (Spanish Arabic loans) or not borrowed at all…
I did not think about school because Russian school does not provoke the desire to borrow “the” (but maybe this fact is not very informative, because nothing in Russian provokes this desire). It is easier for me to believe that the source is band names.
What gave speakers of late Latin the urge to start putting this kind of labels on nouns? Not band names, surely?
Y, Russian information structure (topic and comment) I think does some of the discoursive job of the category of definiteness. And our information structure is expressed by word order and intonation.
I expect articles to appear when word order gets hijacked by syntax (in IE. Asian languages where topics are marked by dedicated (and sometimes numerous) markers are an entirely different story… which I don’t know).
@Y: Besides the change from free word order with inflection for case to syntactically determined word order without case inflection, influence from Greek speakers will probably also have played a role (all those great but now forgotten Greek rock bands…)
What is disturbing is that it is all over Europe now. WALS def indef.
Along with a perfect with “have”, comparatives with “than”, and a bunch of other “Euroversals”.