Hi everybody;
Iam asking if there is dual in latin , and if there was ,where can i find its rules in the grammar books which on the site.
thank you.
You may be happy to know that there is no dual plural form in Latin. Just regular singular and plural.
I recall that the Romans themselves believed that Latin was derived from a particular dialect of Greek precisely on the grounds that this dialect had not retained dual forms.
ambo, -ae and duo, -ae are duals.
Might you declinate, for instance, molla,-æ in the same way like the dual Greek (-α, -ω, -ε; -αιν, -οιν, -οιν)?
I believe Puer_Dux wanted to mean if there was a dual case. Merely, duo, -æ means a set of two, not a special case. Therefore would uterque be dual?
I am not correcting anything, I am just trying to clarify it.
No, ambo, ambae itself is declined as the Old Latin dual. Latin lost the dual, but kept it in certain words, ambo ambae, duo, duae being two examples. Their full conjugation:
n. duo duae duo
g. duorum duarum duorum
d. duobus duabus duobus
a. duos duas duo
a. duobus duabus duobus
PS - uterque is closer to meaning both one and another, not anything paired. The dual hypothetically is for pairs.
Well, thank you, Chris. But, when I learnt the declension I wasn´t advertised it was another declination.
Thank you every body for your help.
Yes Gonzalo I meant a dual case .
And to be more specific if there is a name and Iam going to decline it would I decline it in singular , plural ,and dual.
I understand from your posts that such case doesn’t exist in Latin, but Chris says that there is certain words still have this form, can anyone provide us with more words and their conjugation.
Thank you again.
I believe that duo and ambo are the only two vestigial remnants of the dual in Latin.
Which of the duo forms are known (or are suspected) to go back to an original dual, since some of those forms, the genitive especially, look like they’re the result of analogy with the plurals of other words? Obviously duo itself is some kind of dual, but what about the rest? The feminine seems kind of strange in that it’s “normal” in everything except duabus.
except duabus
Compare -abus with -ibus.
I agree that the -bus is not out of nowhere but I meant that everything else is like the plural of a 1st declension feminine except for duabus, which makes me wonder if it’s archaic somehow, even though I don’t think there was a separate feminine dual in Proto-Indo-European.
Don’t forget deabus.
I had forgotten about deabus. So now it seems to me that duae does preserve an archaic form of the first declension, especially as I looked it up to see that the corresponding Sanskrit declension has a bh in the dat./abl. which I would think is related to the b in -bus. But is duae then just a first declension plural created by analogy or does it have some source in archaic dual forms?
Sihler seems to indicate that it’s a mixed paradigm.
“The three Genders are retained in Latin, but of the Numbers the Dual has disappeared. Traces of it remain in the Numeral du? Nom., du?bus Dat., du?, afterwards du?s, Acc. (on oct? see ch. iv. §5), and in the Pronoun amb? Nom., amb?bus Dat., ambo, afterwards amb?s, Acc… On early inscriptions, when two members of a family are mentioned the Dual (in o) is used, e.g. M. C. Pompli? ‘Marcus, Gaius Pompilii’.” Lindsay, A Short Historical Latin Grammar p.42. http://www.archive.org/details/shorthistoricall00linduoft
Except for the last sentence, isn’t that essentially what I said?
Yes, Chris, it’s as you said. By my saying nothing (the words are Lindsay’s), I wasn’t implying something new. I was just advertising a link to the Lindsay book which confirms what you said, and which is a nice online reference source for questions relating to archaic forms. Puer_dux had asked for references to grammar books, so I wanted to slip the reference in. I didn’t mean the interjection to detract from the direction of the discussion.
…nor rebus, no diebus either.