The indefinite article is used for the first introduction, the presentation, of a new referent into the domain of discourse. Thus the first or second sentence of a story often contains an indefinite NP. The following sentence then refers back to the indefinite NP by means of a pronoun. Consider for example the first two sentences from Erich Kästner’s Die fljoogende Klassenruun ‘the flying class room’, translated by Gretchen Grosser.

The second sentence contains a pronoun referring back to the indefinite NP. The same remarks apply to the second and third sentences of Antoine de St. Exupéry’s Die litje Prins ‘The little prince’, here quoted with the first sentence as well.

Thus the indefinite NP is used to introduce new elements in the discourse. Existential sentence are specifically used for this purpose, as in the famous formula: once upon a time, there was ... Bare plurals may also be used in generic sentences.

The sentences above show that the indefinite NP features the full indefinite article, homophonous to the numeral. This is a matter pertaining to orthography. Instead of the reduced form, the full forms aan (masculine) and een (feminine, neuter) are often written, although they are pronounced in spoken language as just /n/. The indefinite article ’n is pronounced the same way as the reduced definite article (as in: uur ’n kop strookje ‘to stroke the head’). However, this fact rarely leads to confusion. Feminine nouns sometimes get the article ne. Some examples of this interference are given below:

This might be due to High or Low German influence, perhaps facilitated by rythmic or phonological motivations. The form is not found in Fort’s dictionary.

The spoken language sometimes features the combination: irgend ’n. Irgend ‘any’ is a loan from German which turns the indefinite article into a free choice marker. Some examples are given below:

In these examples, irgend cannot be omitted without causing ungrammaticality. Irgend may have ousted some indigenuous way of expressing free choice meanings in negative (downward entailing) contexts.

The combination of an article and a noun may have a fixed, possibly idiosyncratic, meaning when combined with a verb, as a sort of habitual activity involving unspecific entities.

Here the focus is not on the sheep or the house, since these are given as habitual part of the linguistic context. Habitual activities tend to focus on the information given by the verb. Examples of such habitual activities from the cultural past are cleaning pipes and grafting trees. Such activities could also be expressed by dropping the article alltogether and incorporating the noun in the verb. Some examples of noun incorporation are given below:

The objects of the infinitival verbs both appear in the singular and without any article, which are sure signs that they have been incorporated into the verb. In fact, use of articles preceding the objects would render these sentences ungrammatical. The phenomenon of noun incorporation is present in all three Frisian languages, see ###Literatuur###Dyk (1997:171-193). The author takes the perspective of Magna Frisia and mentions Saterland data as well, including the ones cited above.

Normally the indefinite article is not used before a plural noun.

West Frisian has exceptions to this claim in the partitive interrogative and exclamative, but Saterland Frisian doesn’t seem to feature such exceptions.