(L&N) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

[VaptuantaDoi]

Is the dual actually productive and in common use in any modern natlangs? It seems like the dual is something languages create early on only to later abandon, but I realize this is probably a heavily biased IE-centric view. Unfortunately my linguistic knowledge is very IE-centric.

Well, if you want an incomplete list including both extinct and modern languages, wikipedia has one. There's no real difference between languages spoken now and languages spoken a few millenia ago; language has been around for a very long time. It's arguable that complexity in morphology is cyclical, and some IE-langs such as English are in a less marked phase.

Edit: For some reason the hyperlink won't work properly. The list is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_%28g ... ual_number.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Yes, I know, the cyclic theory is something I'm really interested in. When I first began to study PIE, I was perplexed by why there was such elaborate inflection in the past that was only fated to vanish later on, as if there's a linear progression from more synthetic to more analytic that's some kind of universal pattern. But then Hittite reflects a "simpler" system that may be more in line with PIE in its original state and the increased complexity of Sanskrit and Ancient Greek developed later. Nonetheless, I'm interested in the dual because my conlang has one and it is productive and in use and I want to know whether that's rare or not, since the only languages with duals that I am familiar with lost the dual over time. The dual will, for obvious reasons, always be more marginal than the singular or plural and perhaps this means that it is always a little unstable. But maybe not. Either way, thanks for the list and I will try to research this question more (something I may write a paper on for one of my classes).

[Sequor]

Some languages in a southern small region of Papua and also some islands east of Papua have dual and trial number in personal pronouns. So does Tok Pisin for some weird reason...

[Zekoslav]

Yes, Oceania is a hotspot for elaborate number marking, most languages have singular, dual and plural, often also trial or paucal or both. This is so widespread it is no wonder it was included in the local English-based creoles! There are also interesting comitative constructions made from a noun and a pronoun inflected for number, IIRC it's something like "John 1-du" = "John and me", "John 1-pl" = "John and us", but I haven't read that in depth grammar of Mwotlap in ages (it's in French, and I haven't been able to find an English version).

[Aevas]

Is the dual actually productive and in common use in any modern natlangs? It seems like the dual is something languages create early on only to later abandon, but I realize this is probably a heavily biased IE-centric view. Unfortunately my linguistic knowledge is very IE-centric.

In Europe, Slovenian marks dual on pronouns, nouns and verbs. Sami languages (at least the bigger ones) mark it on pronouns and verbs but not nouns (although some dialects have lost it there too).

[Sequor]

Loanwords influencing the recipient language's phonology, especially phonotactics, isn't that rare. English word-initial voiced fricatives are almost entirely due to loanwords, while Štokavian (the basis for standard Serbo-Croatian and its 'descendants') /f/ and /d͡ʒ/ wouldn't be phonemic without loanwords. Loanwords also contain the majority of word-final consonant clusters (e.g. tekst, student), native clusters are concentrated in onsets.

Yeah, I think this always ends up happening when a language borrows massive amounts of vocabulary from another. Even when no new phonemes are borrowed, as in the case of Spanish and Latin (and maybe also Croatian and Latin/Italian/French?), the phoneme distribution is affected. Inherited Spanish didn't have -ct-, pl-, cl-, -x- [ks], or word-initial fV [fV] with a monophthong.

[Salmoneus]

It seems like the dual is something languages create early on only to later abandon

I can't disprove this theory. However, it would rely on almost incomprehensible good luck.

A quick timeline:
20,000,000-15,000,000 BP: Great apes (hominids) split from gibbons. Gibbons are already very intelligent, but the great apes are smarter, and show the rudiments and fundamentals of linguistic thought - symbolic naming, syntactic rules, etc - though at this time lack a full-fledged language
13,000,000-4,000,000 BP: Hominina (humans and close relatives) diverge from chimpanzees
5,000,000 BP rapid expansion in size and change in form of hominin brains
3,000,000 BP: homo habilis develops, with unambiguous and extensive use of stone tools (and also toothpicks)
2,000,000 BP: homo erectus - complex tool use, intentional use of fire, some debated evidence of art. Brain size appears to have doubled.
200,000 BP: homo sapiens arises.
80,000-30,000 BP: complete behavioural modernity emerges: art, music, religious rituals, trade, cosmetics, etc
10,000 BP: development of agriculture, founding of Jericho
7,000 BP: Eridu, the first city
6,000 BP: the rise of Uruk
5,500 BP: Uruk invents writing, soon copied by the Egyptians and other
5,000 BP: Late Proto-Indo-European probably still spoken, with dual
2,500-1,500 BP: Dual has declined considerably in most IE languages, but still going strong in Slavic, and with substantial, systematic (if minimal) presence in some other branches (Germanic, Celtic, Baltic) while others have relatively recently lost it (Indo-Aryan, Greek)
0 BP: Dual has been lost entirely from almost all IE languages


Now, we don't know when language in a modern sense arose, but it was certainly tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the dual was going strong in Europe up until the last couple of thousand years.

So let's put it this way: if the dual is indeed something languages invent "early on" (i.e. hundreds of thousands of years ago), but eventually (i.e. just lately) discard, we're remarkably lucky (or unlucky!) to be living, in the larger scheme of things, immediately just after it was finally yet inevitably lost across Europe.

[Khemehekis]

The dual is alive and well in languages as familiar to Americans as Hebrew and Arabic.

A neat thing about the dual: In Hebrew some nouns such as "eyes" are so inveterately dual, that one would use the dual instead of the plural even to say things like, "The spider has eight eyes" or "The alien had three eyes".


And I have just made my 2,500th post!

[ixals]

This is a common thing though. Some of the body parts in Slavic languages are irregular in the plural because they use the obsolete dual for the plural instead.

[zyma]

The dual is alive and well in languages as familiar to Americans as Hebrew and Arabic.

For whatever it's worth, that may be true for Modern Standard Arabic, but the dual is no longer as vibrant in the modern spoken varieties/"dialects".

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Thanks for the answers, everyone

What do you think of my theory that because the dual is inherently marginal (people are simply more likely to refer to one of something or more than two of something than just two) it is inherently unstable and prone to decline?

[VaptuantaDoi]

What do you think of my theory that because the dual is inherently marginal (people are simply more likely to refer to one of something or more than two of something than just two) it is inherently unstable and prone to decline?

It is marginal in the sense that most languages don't have one, and the plural is much more common. But I don't think it's "inherrently" unstable. There are some languages which have kept the dual for as far back as we can reconstruct, so it must have some degree of stability. It seems to be prone to decline in IE languages, but I'm not sure about worldwide. It is true that people are less likely to use the dual than the plural, but they're also less likely to use the plural than the singular. Lots of languages don't have a plural, but I doubt anyone would say it was inherrently marginal.

However, looking at the examples of languages with a dual, a lot of them have it only in a few cases or with big gaps. You could certainly make the claim that it is likely to be dropped, but the fact that it still occurs in languages from widely different families after hundreds of thousands of years of language change, I think it's unlikely to be very unstable.

[Sequor]

The dual certainly tends to be more syncretic across cases, have gaps, and be morphologically a lot more regular. The difference between the dual and the plural is very stark in Arabic for example: while the dual is a simple suffix whose final shape is very predictable from the singular, the plural is very much the opposite.

[sangi39]

As a sort of vague counterexample, the Icelandic first person and second person plural pronouns, við and þið, derive from the Old Norse dual, while the ON plurals, vér and þér, have almost entirely fallen out of use.

As Khemehekis mentioned above with Hebrew as well, the dual has gone on to become another sort of plural (for typically paired objects). The distinction is, presumably, being lost, but it's not always the dual that fades away.

[Aevas]

Thanks for the answers, everyone

What do you think of my theory that because the dual is inherently marginal (people are simply more likely to refer to one of something or more than two of something than just two) it is inherently unstable and prone to decline?

In terms of markedness (as used e.g. in the theoretical framework of Natural Morphology), the cline goes singular < plural < dual. Less marked features and forms are more likely to remain stable over time, and more marked ones will tend to merge into them and/or adopt their forms.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Thanks. We learned about markedness hierarchies in my typology class last quarter. :)

[Omzinesý]

Thanks for the answers, everyone

What do you think of my theory that because the dual is inherently marginal (people are simply more likely to refer to one of something or more than two of something than just two) it is inherently unstable and prone to decline?

In terms of markedness (as used e.g. in the theoretical framework of Natural Morphology), the cline goes singular < plural < dual. Less marked features and forms are more likely to remain stable over time, and more marked ones will tend to merge into them and/or adopt their forms.

Semantically, the plural of languages with a dual and the plural of languages without a dual are two different things. The first one is 'more than two items' while the second one is 'more than one item'. So if a language loses dual, it also loses its old plural.
Morphologically, it is usual that the old plural form also acquires the function of the older dual. But if the word usually appears in the dual, it's very possible that it is the old dual form that generalizes. For example Swedish ögon 'eyes' is the old dual form. (If somebody comes to say it is not, I will learn something new.)

[Aevas]

Morphologically, it is usual that the old plural form also acquires the function of the older dual. But if the word usually appears in the dual, it's very possible that it is the old dual form that generalizes. For example Swedish ögon 'eyes' is the old dual form. (If somebody comes to say it is not, I will learn something new.)

I think ögon 'eyes' and öron 'ears' both go back to older plurals. But they still (kinda) illustrate your point, because they have retained a vowel change which has been leveled out in other words of the same type (e.g. hjärtan 'hearts'; cf. Icelandic augu, eyru, hjörtu). The frequency of the plural form is doubtlessly the reason for this. Similarly, as the feminine is being merged into the masculine gender in the Norwegian of Olso, a new declension type with different plural forms has arisen for the two words tand 'tooth' and hand 'hand', where the frequency of the plural forms led them to resist unconditionally adopting masculine forms.

Albanian sy 'eye (sg.)' and Armenian աչք 'id.' both apparently derive from the PIE dual *h₃ókʷih₁.

[Zekoslav]

I've got a question about a minor sound change from Latin to French:

So far I've been able exactly two proparoxytones ending in -agus, sarcophagus > cercueil and Rotomagus > Rouen. They undergo a special development, intervocalic /g/ is completely lost and -aus contracts to -us. The words develop as if they were *sarcofus and *Rotomus, and in fact we have an attestation of the latter in a 7th century Merovingian document: in Rodomo.

This is in contrast to paroxytones in -agus, where /g/ becomes /w/ rather than being lost and there is no contraction, and -agus eventually ends up as -ou. Though there aren't many examples of this development either, I can remember only fagus > fou.

I wonder when this change happened. It looks like it should have been quite early, give that it gave rise to a Merovingian Latin spelling mistake. Intervocalic /g/ > /w/ before rounded vowels is regular and part of the Western Romance lenition, it is attested in Occitan as well where fagus > fau. So if we suppose this contraction followed lenition, we'd have /agos/ > /aɣos/ > /awos/ > /owos/ > /ows/ in paroxytones and /agos/ > /aɣos/ > /awos/ > /owos/ > /oos/ > /os/ > /s/ or maybe /awos/ > /aos/ > /os/ > /s/ in proparoxytones. But it may have been earlier, since there's words where intervocalic /g/ was lost already in Vulgar Latin Proto-Romance whatever the preferred term for the ancestor of Romance languages is.

I wish we had cognates of cercueil, especially Occitan cognates, but at least Wiktionary doesn't know of any. Anyone knows of anything that may help?

[Aevas]

According to Englebert (2015), intervocalic /g/ > /ɣ/ occurs already in "Gallo-Romance", which I take to refer to the regional variety of late VL spoken prior to 842.