Definite articles are simply determiners, and all languages, whether they have formal articles or not, have some means of accomplishing the same function.

Chinese has its classifier or measure words. Russian and Latin use inflections. In modern Western languages, definite and indefinite articles became necessary where inflections either disappeared or became unreliable for this purpose.

Since Esperanto’s inflections are not designed to function as determiners, something more reliable than context had to be used, and a definite article was probably the best, most familiar option for a Romance-like language.

The downside of Esperanto’s definite article is that the nitty-gritty details of its use were never carved in stone, with the result that there’s a lot of variation concerning when it applies and when it doesn’t. French writers, I’ve read, tend to use it too much, Slavic writers too little.

Most Esperantidos I’ve seen, for all their improvements, stick to the Esperanto model of a definite article but no indefinite one — but add definite rules for how the definite article should be used. One Esperantido, Romániço, went the other way and added an indefinite article as well.

In any case, the simplicity of an article-free language is certainly appealing, but in the end, clarity and precision matter more, and context, while it can go a long way, too often isn’t enough. My guess is that people’s issues with the definite article disappear after they’ve dealt with the limitations of context and other work-arounds enough times.

Leandro_rj:In those cases, In my opinion in Esperanto you would to follow the pattern in English.

All of them?

nornen:
EN: Life's too short. (...to securely remove USB devices.)

I think "la vivo" is definitely indicated here. In the Fundamento, Zamenhof gives "Ni estu gajaj, ni uzu bone la vivon, ĉar la vivo ne estas longa." In English this would never take the definite article.

And more recently, in Libera Folio a few months ago:
"Ekde tie mi ekpensis, kiel rilatigi ĝin al Karnavalo kaj al la vivo ĝenerale, ne nur kiel lingvon, sed kiel agmanieron aŭ filozofion, bazitan sur klareco, sincereco kaj unuiĝo."

In English, "life in general"

nornen:This makes it difficult for me to decide where to use "la" in Esperanto and where not. Should I follow the pattern of English? Or maybe Spanish? Or maybe German?

Leaving the examples and footnotes out, here’s what one book says on the matter:

Being Colloquial in Esperanto:
There is less standardization in the use of la in Esperanto than in some other languages, and what there is tends to correspond with the least-common-denominator usage of Western European languages. You should be prepared for la to turn up where it would not appear in English or be missing where we would use it.

That said, the easiest rule is to use la like English “the” except for the following common differences:

[list=1]
Esperanto la often occurs before abstract nouns where “the” would never occur.
Esperanto uses la before a possessive adjective when there is no noun with it.
Esperanto uses la before an adjective when the noun is not explicitly stated, but rather understood (where English would also use the dummy noun “one” or “ones”.
Esperanto often uses la where English would use a possessive adjective, especially for kinship relations, body parts, and for clothes and other objects intimately connected with the speaker.
Esperanto uses la with the adjective name of an ethnic group to produce names for languages.
Esperanto often uses la before a singular category name where in English we would use a plural without an article.
Esperanto uses la before a generic noun that is followed by a proper noun naming a unique item.[/list]

morfran:Definite articles are simply determiners, and all languages, whether they have formal articles or not, have some means of accomplishing the same function.

Chinese has its classifier or measure words. Russian and Latin use inflections. In modern Western languages, definite and indefinite articles became necessary where inflections either disappeared or became unreliable for this purpose.

Since Esperanto’s inflections are not designed to function as determiners, something more reliable than context had to be used, and a definite article was probably the best, most familiar option for a Romance-like language.

Morfran, could you elaborate a bit, because I am not sure I understand your point (which is most surely due to my limited knowledge of this topic).

How do Russian and Latin (nominal) inflections relate to determiners or definiteness? If I recall correctly, Latin (and Russian) declensions mark case, number and (sometimes) gender, but never definiteness (1). Thus, the inflection a noun takes in Latin depends on which case is assigned to it (by a verb, by a preposition, or some may argue in the case of nominative by INFL) and this has more to do with thematic roles than with definiteness.

I do not know whether the advent of articles in Romance languages happened at the same time as the reduction of the case-system took place, but I fail to see how articles expressing definiteness can compensate the lack of case (and hence be the consequence of it). Also most (all?) Romance articles have been derived from Latin demonstratives (ille, illa, illud; iste, ista, istud; etc) which always have been determiners (and themselves were inflected).

I would really appreciate if you could shed some more light on this topic.

----
(1) Some other languages -the scandinavic ones come to mind- do indeed express definiteness via endings (pige, piger, pigen, pigerne), but I am not sure whether these are inflections or clitics or a mix of both (maybe pigen < pige den[ne]).

nornen:How do Russian and Latin (nominal) inflections relate to determiners or definiteness?

A few of examples from the Wikipedia article on Russian grammar, and elsewhere:

Definiteness determined by inflection:

Я не вижу книги = I don’t see any book (“book” is in the genitive case)
Я не вижу книгу = I don’t see the book (“book” is in the accusative case)

Definiteness determined by word order:

В комнату вбежал мальчик. = A boy rushed into the room. (“Into room rushed boy”)
Мальчик вбежал в комнату. = The boy rushed into the room. (“Boy rushed into room”)

Definiteness determined by есть (“there is”):

У кого есть ключ от дома? = Who has a key to the house?
У кого ключ от дома? = Who has the key to the house?

Indefiniteness determined by the number one:

Встретил одного друга, пришлось поговорить. = I met a friend and had to talk.

Indefiniteness determined by plurality:

Вы купите это в магазинах. = You can buy this in a shop (“You buy this in shops.”)

Latin had similar methods of conveying definiteness. Vulgar Latin sometimes used the demonstrative pronouns and the number one as articles, but only in a limited way. They didn’t become the norm until sometime after the case system and the free word order it made possible fell away.