Dual grammatical number: Encyclopedia II - Dual grammatical number - Use in modern languages

Dual grammatical number - Use in modern languages

Among living languages, modern standard Arabic has a mandatory dual number, marked on nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns. (First-person dual forms, however, do not exist; compare this to the lack of third-person dual forms in the old Germanic languages.) Many of the spoken Arabic dialects have a dual marking for nouns (only), but its use is not mandatory. Hebrew, a related Semitic language, also has some forms of dual, largely for measurements of time, parts of the body and things that come in pairs, such as švu`ayim (two weeks), `eynayim (eyes), šinayim (teeth, even all 32), and mišqafayim (eyeglasses). Likewise, Akkadian had a dual number, though its use was confined to standard phrases like "two hands", "two eyes", and "two arms".

The Inuktitut language uses dual forms.

In Austronesian languages, particularly Polynesian languages such as Hawaiian, Niuean and Tongan, possess a dual number for pronouns but not for nouns (indeed, they tend not to mark nouns for number at all). Other Austronesian languages, particularly those spoken in the Philippines, have a dual first-person pronoun; these languages include Ilokano (data), Tausug (kita), and Kapampangan (ikata). These forms mean we, but specifically you and I. This form once existed in Tagalog but has largely disappeared, save for certain rural dialects, since the middle of the 20th century.

The dual was a standard feature of the Proto-Uralic language, and lives on in Sami languages and Samoyedic languages, while other branches like Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian have lost it. Sami also features dual pronouns, expressing the concept of "we two here" as contrasted to "we". Nenets, a Samoyedic language, features a complete set of dual possessive suffixes for two systems, the number of possessor and the number of possessed objects (e.g. "two houses of us two" expressed in one word).

The dual form is also used in several modern Indo-European languages, such as Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian and Sorbian (see below for details). The dual was a common feature of all early Slavic languages at the beginning of the second millennium.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Use in modern languages", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki