 "’ translates to “Are there any books?”

Articles have developed independently in many different language families across the globe.Generally, articles develop over time usually by specialization of certain adjectives or determiners, and their development is often a sign of languages becoming more analytic instead of synthetic, perhaps combined with the loss of inflection as in English, Romance languages, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Torlakian.Joseph Greenberg in
Universals of Human Language
describes "the cycle of the definite article"