Comment by dataflow
11 hours ago
Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
11 hours ago
Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
It should be noted that only Modern Standard Arabic (the modern common Arabic language based on the language used in the Qur'an) still has dual. Most (if not all?) spoken dialects, which evolved from this form of Arabic have already lost dual.
It's interesting that we notice a similar pattern of losing the dual in many languages. And it would be very interesting to find the opposite pattern: a language where the dual newly develops out of nowhere. However, I do not know of such language.
Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-European language, which has dual number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)
So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested ancestor that did.
The Semitic language family is not part of the proto-indo-european language family. It's from the Afroasiatic family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages
Persian is PIE and had influence over semitic languages in cultural contact. The connection could be there.
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Within Indo-European languages, Irish has the concept of the dual. It's used with things that come in pairs like "mo dhá láimh" - my two hands.
Interestingly, to say one-handed you'd say "leath-lámh", where _leath_ means half, so half the <thing that's usually one of a pair>.
Semitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.