The body of previous study of this research area lacks comprehensive description, except Pohoncowa (2017), who describes the word formation in the present-day Upper Sorbian language.
To discern the nature of these morphemes, I researched the entries in the Upper Sorbian retrograde dictionary by Meskank (2001), which is based on Volkel's dictionary (1981) and contains 44500 entries.
Internacionalizmy w hornjoserbskej spisownej reci pfitomnosce: Zarys problematiki [Internationalism in the present-day Upper Sorbian written language: Outline of the problems].
(6) The verb rybac is taken from Schuster-Sewc (1978-1989: 1255-1256), which seems not to exist in the present-day Upper Sorbian.
The first part of the discussion focuses on the article-like usages of jedan 'one' in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Upper Sorbian. This part of the paper is an overview of the literature and it does not claim to present new language data but it tries to summarize different approaches in a consistent way.
Bulgarian, Macedonian and Upper Sorbian are the languages most directly exposed to the influence of the languages with the fully developed grammatical category of the indefinite article.
Upper Sorbian has been in contact with German for many centuries and it is therefore not surprising that it has almost replicated the German indefinite article by grammaticalizing the numeral jedyn 'one' into the contracted monosyllabic indefinite article jen that is used in indefinite specific, indefinite non-specific and generic contexts.
(15) Furthermore, example (8i) shows the use of the indefinite article-like jen to determine specified type in Upper Sorbian (example taken form Scholze 2006).
Nevertheless, the data presented in this paper proves that claims by Heine and Kuteva (2006) need to be reconsidered, particularly the claims stating that the Croatian 'one' still has not fully reached the specific indefinite marker stage of grammaticalization into indefinite article and that 'one' in Upper Sorbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian has not moved beyond that same stage.
The number of speakers of
Upper Sorbian today is estimated at thirty to forty thousand, and that of Lower Sorbian at ten to twenty thousand.
This is the lowest prefixation RSV in the Slavic genus (identical to Bulgarian, Polish and
Upper Sorbian).