Dual. Dual number in Old Russian

Technique and Internet 27.09.2019

Technique and Internet

The Russian language is one of the largest world languages with a long history. It belongs to the Slavic dialect, and the closest to it are the Belarusian and Ukrainian languages. Together they make up the East Slavic subgroup. Throughout its history, the rules and grammar have undergone numerous changes. So, for example, over time, the Russian language lost its dual number, which will be discussed below.

History of occurrence

The Old Russian language is the progenitor of the familiar Russian language. He inherited a lot from the Proto-Slavic, which, in turn, received its structure from the pan-European. Old Russian consisted of a completely different alphabet and different from modern grammar. If we talk about the account, without which life would be impossible in principle, then in addition to the singular and plural there was also a specific dual number.

In the Old Russian language, it was used to refer to paired items: gloves, glasses, etc. This greatly simplified the understanding of the meaning of what was said. For example, the interlocutor told you that he bought two gloves. What did he mean? Did he buy one pair of gloves or two pairs? Until the specified grammatical construction left the language, such misunderstandings did not arise.

Use in other languages

In addition to Russian, such grammar was also present in the languages of other countries. For example, the Indo-European proto-language. It had three forms of the dual number for different cases:

Nominative, accusative, vocative.
Genitive, Local (Prepositional).
Dative, Deposition, Creative.

For example, in the language under consideration, the numeral "eight" was a form of the dual number "four". In some other languages (Tocharian) there was also a separate pair number for denoting objects that arose naturally in pairs: hands, eyes, etc.

Currently, this form of calculus is present in Arabic, Hebrew and some other little-used dialects.

When was the grammatical construction used

Until the dual number fell into disuse, it was used in the following cases:

The designation of objects that naturally come in pairs, mainly somatisms - ears, eyes. Accordingly, when using these words, the interlocutor immediately understood that they were talking about parts of the body of one person.
Mention of persons in the amount of two. For this, there was a special morphological form - the ending "a", "i" and zero (more on that below). For example, table - tables - tables, where the second word denotes a dual number.
Use of words two and both, which were used with the desired form of the word and denoted duality. For example, two brothers.

In modern Russian, there are some words that refer to the lost grammar.

Description of the morphology of the construct

The most typical endings for the dual number of the Old Russian language are "a" and "ѣ", the second of which is not used now due to the loss of the symbol. They also include the ending "and".

For nouns, there are some rules for using numbers:

masculine nouns (in modern language- noun I skl.) have the ending "a" or, if the stem ends in a soft consonant - "I": two chairs, mole, elk etc.;
(I skl.) and feminine (II skl.) had the ending "ѣ" with a hard consonant at the end and "and" - with a soft one: two sisters;
in all other cases (this includes the III declension), the dual number manifested itself through the ending "and": two mice.

There were also exceptions. This referred to the morpheme -u lost in antiquity, which over time was supplanted by the ancient plural, and the noun of the dative and instrumental case, where there was an ending "ma".

The remaining parts of speech were declined almost as described above, had the same endings and usage.

History of study

The first who began to explore the grammatical construction of Old Slavonic was A. Belich. In one of his works of 1899, devoted to this topic, he was puzzled why such a useful and used form is now completely lost in most languages, and still exists in some. The problem has been studied for many years, but the reasons have not been established.

There are a few scientific works XX century foreign scholars devoted to the dual number: Dostal (Polish), Lotzsch (Serbal Lusatian) and others. The results of the research are recognized as final, but they do not answer the specific question posed.

Currently, research is also being carried out on the lost construction, further possible ways of its use are being considered, however, there are no facts confirming the return to the Russian language.

Survivals of the dual number in Russian

There are few words whose forms are inherited from the Old Russian language. Some paired objects retained the morphology characteristic of the dual number: eyes, sleeves, sides, eyes, horns etc. The same applies to the plural forms of cases, for example, two, three, two, three, four etc., where -X and - me- endings of the dual number. Many more examples could be given.

In proverbs, this grammatical construction also occurs periodically: " A sparrow sits on a tyne, hopes on a wing". Here the word "wing" is an obsolete form of the dual accusative.

There are words that have long been "petrified", and it is almost impossible to discern a dual number there. For example, adverbs personally and between. The first comes from the word eyes and meant "to see something with one's (two) eyes". And the second is a slightly modified form obsolete word boundary.

The meaning of the construction for the modern language

As a rule, returning the old is not good. If something is out of use, it means that it was needed so, you should move for a new one. However, not in this case.

The dual number is a useful construct. It makes no sense to return it to the grammar of the modern Russian language, but for linguists, knowledge and study of the lost is useful. When considering the origins, the secrets of the origin of certain words are revealed. For example, a hoop. It looks like it was borrowed, but it's not. It consists of two words: both and arms. That is, a hoop is an object that must be taken with two hands. Another word is earrings. Like the first example, it refers to the original Russian. Was formed by the merger ears and dress up. Thus, the dual number played an important role in word formation.

The influence of language on the worldview

Since human speech is a link between individuals, it is also capable of directing other actions to transform the world. The singular gives a vision of one independent object, the plural describes the whole set. The dual allowed our ancestors to single out, among other things, opposites, the paired nature of the world.

When the grammatical construction left the language, the person stopped seeing the peculiarity in this double and began to isolate with the multitude. Hence follows the erection of the cult of personality and its entry into a powerful society. But against the background of this ideology, the value of love and marriage, the distinction between good and evil, as well as other important opposites, have now begun to be lost.

From the foregoing, it follows that speech is a natural engine of development. The loss of the dual number was reflected in the moral component of people, in culture and in general in the worldview.

Philosophical meaning

One of the greatest philologists of all time, Wilhelm von Humboldt, attributed the dual number to a special form of calculus, not comparable to the ordinary plural. Translated into colloquial Russian, his thought sounded something like this - "husband and wife are one Satan." This meant that the two parts are components of one whole, and their existence is meaningless without each other. For example, an explosion. When oxygen and a spark interact, such a phenomenon occurs, but they cannot do anything like this alone.

The dual number in German sounded like dualis. An association immediately appears in the head with the unity of opposites, duality.

If we consider the construction as a philosophical component, then it can transform speech: shorten verbal explanations, which will make the process of mutual understanding easier, but at the same time expand the boundaries of the language. If there was such a grammar, then there were reasons.

Summing up, it is worth noting that each letter, word or construction is important for the language. They change the meaning of what was said, reflect the state of society for a given period of time, show values. Therefore, human speech needs constant monitoring, cutting off the superfluous and replenishing with useful new ones.

In languages that have dual forms, we find two varieties of this concept. One variety is represented by Greenlandic, in which the word nuna "earth" has the dual form nunak and the plural form nunat; here “the form of the dual number is used mainly in those cases when the speaker wants to especially emphasize that we are talking about two objects; if, on the other hand, duality is self-evident, as, for example, with body parts that exist in pairs, then the plural form is almost always used. Thus it is customary to say issai "his eyes", siutai "his ears", talk "his hands", etc., rather than issik, siutik, tatdlik "his two eyes", etc. The plural form is often is used even with the numeral mardluk "two", which itself is a dual form, for example inuit mardluk "two people"" (Kleinschmidt, Grammatik der grönländischen Sprache, 13).

Another variety is represented by Indo-European languages. The dual form is used here for objects occurring in pairs. The dual number existed in many of the ancient languages of this family; over time, the forms of the dual number gradually disappeared, and now they are preserved only in certain dialects (Lithuanian, Lusatian, Slovene, as well as in personal pronouns in some Bavarian dialects). In the process of the gradual disappearance of dual forms from the Indo-European languages, there are many interesting phenomena that we cannot consider here in detail. The existence of a dual number is usually considered (Levy-Bruhl, Meillet) as an indicator of primitive thinking, and its disappearance as an indicator of the progress of civilization. In my own opinion, any simplification, any elimination of former superfluous distinctions, is progressive, although the causal relationship between civilization as a whole and particular grammatical changes cannot be shown in detail.

AT Greek the dual number was early lost in the colonies, where the stage of civilization was relatively higher, but remained very stable in continental Greece, for example, in Lacedaemon, Boeotia and Attica. In Homer, the dual forms are quite common, but they are apparently an artificial archaism, which is used for poetic purposes (especially for size); however, to designate two persons, plural forms are often used in the immediate vicinity of dual forms (cf. combinations like amphō kheiras - Od., 8. 135). In Gothic, dual forms exist only for pronouns of the 1st and 2nd person and for the corresponding forms of verbs; however, the dual forms of verbs are few.

In other ancient Germanic languages, the dual number is retained only in the pronouns "we" and "you", but later it disappears in them too. (On the contrary, the dual forms vip, yuir have supplanted the former plural forms vyr, yuir in modern Icelandic, and possibly also in Danish - vi, I). Isolated traces of the former dual have been found in the forms of several nouns, such as door "door" (originally two wings) and breast "breast", but even here these forms have long been understood not as dual forms, but as singular forms. . Now the dual number can be seen only in two words - two "two" and both "both"; however, it should be noted that when both is used as a "conjunction", it is often applied to more than two things, for example both London, Paris, and Amsterdam "both London, and Paris and Amsterdam"; though some grammarians rebel against this usage, it is found in a number of good writers.

According to Gotio, the forms of the dual number of Skt. akī, gr. osse, lit. akm, in fact, does not mean either "two eyes", or even "an eye and another eye", but means "an eye since it is represented by two"; thus mitra is "Mitra represented by two", i.e. Mitra and Varuna, for Varuna is Mitra's counterpart. We find the same in Skr. bhanī "day and (night)", pitbrāu "father and (mother)", mātbrāu "mother and (father)"; then also pitbrāu mātbrāu "father and mother" (both in dual form); somewhat excellent c. Aiante Teukron te "Ayante (dual) and Teucer". Finno-Ugric languages have parallels to most of these constructions; Thus, in combinations like īmeхen igeхen “old man and old woman”, teteхen tukhgen “winter and summer”, both words are plural.

In some cases, traces of the lost dual number have been preserved, but their true character is no longer felt. Thus, for example, in Old Norse the pronoun yuau "they are two" is an old form of the dual number. At the same time, it is also a neuter plural form. In this regard, a syntactic rule arises, according to which the plural form of the neuter gender is also used when in question both male and female at the same time.

In Russian, the old forms of the dual number of some words coincided with the forms of the genitive case singular. hours; as a result, cases like two peasants led to the use of the genitive singular of other words; it is curious that this usage, after the concept of the dual number disappeared, extended to the words three and four: four years, etc.

Essence, adj, pronouns, verbs had units, plurals and duals. However, the two number has been lost in the entire morphological system and in all dialects. The loss of the duality of number and the development of the opposition of only units and plurality is the result of the development of human thinking from the idea of conc and abstract plurality.

The remainder of two numbers is the forms that were perceived by a person and used in speech most often in the form of two numbers: 2 horns (rosi), 2 sides (botsi), 2 eyes (eyes), 2 banks (birches). In general, noun m.r. 2 declensions with the numeral 2,3,4 govern entities in the gender case of the units of the number. The remainder of the two numbers in the RL is also the adverb in person, which by origin is a form of places of cases in the two numbers from the eye with the preposition въ - въ очю. Dual? (lat. dualis) - a form of declension and conjugation, used to refer to two objects, or paired in nature (parts of the body, etc.) or according to custom. The division into singular, dual and plural is perhaps a relic of a distant era, when counting was rarely used in practice, and grammatically expressed forms meaning “one”, “two, pair” and “many” were sufficient in most practical cases. The category of dual number existed in the ancient languages of the Indo-European family, in Semitic and many other languages . In the vast majority of modern Indo-European languages, the dual has disappeared, leaving only more or less numerous traces of its existence. At present, there are only a few, few remnants of the dual number in Russian. The forms of the dual (instead of the plural) number retained the names of some paired objects: horns, eyes, coasts, sleeves, sides, shoulders, hips, arms, legs, knees, ears, eyes, mude, etc. The forms of quasi- genitive case (actually nominative-accusative-vocative dual) with numerals: two brothers, according to the type of which combinations arise, like two wives with the genitive case, as well as three, four brothers, forms of indirect cases of the numeral two: two, two-m, two-mya, where two- is the genitive-prepositional of the dual number, complicated by pronoun endings like those, those, etc.: instrumental forms in numerals two, three, four, where me = ancient the ending of the dative and instrumental dual number -ma, softened under the influence of the ending of the instrumental plural mi (originally there were two, but three). Numeral twelve (nominative, accusative, vocative feminine), two hundred (instead of two hundred, nominative, accusative, vocative neuter). Some adverbs like personally (dual pronoun), between (also), etc. I.p. = V.p., R.p. = local, D.p. = Tv.p. This form was supported only in book-written speech. Reflection in the monuments of the 10th - 11th centuries. Errors in the use of forms in the monuments (instead of the dual number, the plural is used), indicates the loss of this category.  With the development of abstract thinking, the category of the dual number is lost. The process of loss begins in the Proto-Slavic era, when three case forms disappear. Similar forms remain. The form of the dual number was in all names and verbs. The final loss occurred - in the 13th - 14th centuries.

Dual number in Old Russian

The dual number also existed in Old Russian(as in other Slavic), but early ( XIII century) began to be replaced by the plural. AT XIV century correct usage forms of the dual number is still common, but there are already various secondary forms nearby, indicating the oblivion of the primary meaning of the original forms of the dual number.

At present, there are only a few, few remnants of the dual number in Russian. These are the forms of the quasi-genitive case (actually nominative, accusative, vocative dual) with numerals: two brothers, according to the type of which combinations arise, as two wifes with the genitive case, and three, four brothers, forms of indirect cases of the numeral two: two, two, two, where two- there is a genitive-prepositional dual number, complicated by pronoun endings by type those, te-m etc.: instrumental forms of numerals two, three, four, where mi = the ancient ending of the dative and creative dual -ma, softened under the influence of the ending of the instrumental plural mi. numeral twelve(nominative, accusative, vocative feminine), two hundred(instead of two hundred, nominative, accusative, vocative neuter). Some adverbs like personally(dual pronoun), between(also), etc.

Some proverbs also retain similar forms: a sparrow sits on a tyne, hopes on a wing(accusative dual), etc. In northern Great Russian dialects, the ending of the dative and instrumental dual -ma is in the role of a plural ending; similar forms are found in Belarusian and Little Russian dialects.

Literature

W. von Humboldt, "Ueber den Dualis" (Berl., 1828, and also Gesamm. Werke, vol. VI);
Silberstein, "Ueber d. Dualis in dem indogerm. Sprachstamm" (Jahn's Jahrbücher, Suppl. XV, 1849);
fr. Müller, "Der Dual im indogerm. und semit. Sprachgebiet" (B., 1860); Brugmann, "Grundriss d. vergl. Grammatik d. indogerm. Sprachen" (Vol. II, 1890), where other literature is listed.