The dual.

From: markodegard@...
Message: 6993
Date: 2001-04-05

I'd been meaning to post a question about the dual, but the recent
conversation has largely cleared up those questions I was capable of
formulating.

One question I do have is about the semantic space the (post-Anatolic)
PIE dual occupied. I gather the Arabic dual covers two of anything
(one dog and one flea would be 'animal[dual-ending]). I never go far
enough in Greek to figure out the Greek dual, beyond the fact it was
moribund even in early Classic times (and was extinct by the time the
New Testament got written). Hebrew is interesting, in that its dual is
almost 100% parallel in usage to the English concept of 'pair',
'things that come in **natural** twos, as with body parts, or in
modern terms, auto headlamps or stereo speakers, i.e., Hebrew and
English both distinguish between a pair of shoes and two shoes, with
Hebrew doing the former distinction with the dual number.

I'm trying to remember. Slavic still has the dual, doesn't it? Who
else?

Grammatical number, and how/why it developed in the first place is
another question. Languages without grammatical number are quite
capable of distinguishing one, more than one, many, and a specific
amount.

I've speculated that the descendant of English *might* be the first IE
language to lose grammatical number. If we had some easy, unambiguous
'count particles', only some slight adjustments would be necessary.