Why Do The French Have The Same Word For One & A?
This was a question put to me by my friend, Camel, a few years back. He thought it preposterous that the indefinite article and the number shared the same form in that language, and wondered how the French didn’t get confused.
Camel’s not a language person, so I did my best to explain in simple terms. I think that I likened it to homonyms in English, such as comparing “I gave him his bag” with “I gave her her bag”, and letting him acknowledge that the presence of two different hers each with different meanings has never led him to confusion in English.
Of the languages that I know all follow this French example of having the same words for the number one and the indefinite article. Admittedly, I only know Germanic and Romance languages so my resource base is limited, but I’m now reassured by a passage I’ve just read in, of all things, a book on the history of mathematics.
It turns out that English did use to have the same word for the indefinite article and the number one. This word was ane. Somewhere between 1100 and 1500 the word ane took on two different pronunciations, depending on how it was being used.
So there you have it: English is perhaps unique in making this distinction, but it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t always the case 
Tags: One