a noun affix. ("boy"); (djal-ART: "the boy"); (djal-ART i madh: "the elder son"); ("girl"); (vajz-ART: "the girl"); (vajz-ART e bukur: "the pretty girl") In Arabic, definiteness is marked by a prefix on both noun and adjective. () with two instances of (DEF-book-DEF-big, literally, "the book the big") in Hungarian, verbs show agreement with the definiteness of their object: (read-1sg.pres.INDEF a book-ACC.sg: "I read a book") versus (read-1sg.pres.DEF the book-ACC.sg: "I read the book") Japanese, ( "I have a/the book"), is ambiguous between definite and indefinite readings. Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Semitic, and auxiliary languages generally have a definite article, often preposed but in some cases postposed. Many other languages do not. Some examples are Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, and modern Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian. When necessary, languages of this kind may indicate definiteness by other means such as demonstratives. It is common for definiteness to interact with the marking of case in certain syntactic contexts. In many languages, a direct object receives distinctive marking only if it is definite. For example, in Turkish, the direct object in the sentence (meaning "I saw the man") is marked with the suffix (indicating definiteness). The absence of the suffix on a direct object in Turkish means that it is indefinite and, in the absence of the indefinite article , no longer explicitly singular: ("I saw a man/I saw men"). In Serbo-Croatian, in the Baltic languages Latvian and Lithuanian, and, to a lesser extent in Slovene, definiteness can be expressed morphologically on prenominal adjectives. The short form of the adjective is interpreted as indefinite, while the long form is definite or specific: short (indefinite): Serbo-Croatian "a new city"; Lithuanian "a white book" ; Latvian "a white house" long (definite): "the new city, a certain new city"; "the white book, a certain white book" ; "the white house" In some languages, the definiteness of the object affects the transitivity of the verb. In the absence of peculiar specificity marking, it also tends to affect the telicity of mono-occasional predications. In some Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish, definite nouns inflect with a dedicated set of suffixes. This is known in Swedish as the grammatical category of Species. See also Construct state Article (grammar) Topic–comment Specificity References Notes Further reading Aguilar-Guevara A, Pozas Loyo J, Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado V (eds.). 2019. Definiteness across languages. Berlin: Language Science Press. . . Open Access. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/227. Hawkins, J.A. (1978) Definiteness and