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96-624: The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European and persisted in many of its descendants , such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit , which have dual forms across nouns, verbs, and adjectives; Gothic , which used dual forms in pronouns and verbs; and Old English (Anglo-Saxon), which used dual forms in its pronouns . It can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Irish , Scottish Gaelic , Lithuanian , Slovene , and Sorbian languages . The majority of modern Indo-European languages, including modern English, have lost

192-699: A printing press in Egypt in 1798; it briefly disappeared after the French departure in 1801, but Muhammad Ali Pasha , who also sent students to Italy, France and England to study military and applied sciences in 1809, reintroduced it a few years later in Boulaq , Cairo . (Previously, Arabic-language presses had been introduced locally in Lebanon in 1610, and in Aleppo , Syria in 1702 ). The first Arabic printed newspaper

288-460: A ت ta . When the dual noun or adjective is rendered in the genitive or accusative cases, the ان -ān becomes ين -ain . Besides the noun and adjective dual, there are also dual verb forms of compulsory use for second and third person, together with their pronouns, but none for the first person. The use of dual in spoken Arabic varies widely and is mostly rendered as ين -ain even when in nominative context. Whereas its use

384-546: A French Jesuit who spent most of his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages. According to current academic consensus, Jones's famous work of 1786 was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included Egyptian , Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi . In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated

480-677: A PIE homeland, the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses are the ones most widely accepted, and also the ones most debated against each other. Following the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew, the original author and proponent of the Anatolian hypothesis, has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe. The table lists

576-679: A classical author, whether taken from other languages (e. g. فيلم film ) or coined from existing lexical resources (e. g. هاتف hātif   "caller" > "telephone"). Structural influence from foreign languages or from the vernaculars has also affected Modern Standard Arabic: for example, MSA texts sometimes use the format "A, B, C and D" when listing things, whereas Classical Arabic prefers "A and B and C and D", and subject-initial sentences may be more common in MSA than in Classical Arabic. For these reasons, Modern Standard Arabic

672-748: A colloquial tone. While there are differences between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, Arabic speakers tend to find these differences unimportant, and generally refer to both by the same name: Fuṣḥā Arabic or al-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā ( العربية الفصحى ), meaning "the most eloquent Arabic". When the distinction is made, they do refer to MSA as Fuṣḥā al-ʻAṣr ( فصحى العصر ), meaning "Contemporary Fuṣḥā" or "Modern Fuṣḥā", and to CA as Fuṣḥā at-Turāth ( فصحى التراث ), meaning "Hereditary Fuṣḥā" or "Historical Fuṣḥā". MSA tends to use simplified sentence structures and drop more complicated ones commonly used in Classical Arabic. Some examples include reliance on verb sentences (sentences that begin with

768-549: A conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as * wódr̥ , * ḱwn̥tós , or * tréyes ; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English words water , hound , and three , respectively. No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using the comparative method . For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: piede and foot , padre and father , pesce and fish . Since there

864-492: A country as their first language and colloquial Arabic dialects as their second language. Modern Standard Arabic is also spoken by people of Arab descent outside the Arab world when people of Arab descent speaking different dialects communicate to each other. As there is a prestige or standard dialect of vernacular Arabic, speakers of standard colloquial dialects code-switch between these particular dialects and MSA. Classical Arabic

960-453: A detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated by 1959. Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie gave a better understanding of Indo-European ablaut . From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE. Scholars have proposed multiple hypotheses about when, where, and by whom PIE was spoken. The Kurgan hypothesis , first put forward in 1956 by Marija Gimbutas , has become

1056-590: A dual number, though its use was confined to standard phrases like "two hands", "two eyes", and "two arms". The dual in Hebrew has also atrophied, generally being used for only time, number, and natural pairs (like body parts) even in its most ancient form . Inuktitut and the related Central Alaskan Yup'ik language use dual forms; however, the related Greenlandic language does not (though it used to have them). Khoekhoegowab and other Khoe languages mark dual number in their person-gender-number enclitics , though

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1152-627: A language. From the 1870s, the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as illustrated by Verner's law , published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role of accent (stress) in language change. August Schleicher 's A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages (1874–77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct

1248-430: A prime example of the linguistic phenomenon of diglossia  – the use of two distinct varieties of the same language, usually in different social contexts. This diglossic situation facilitates code-switching in which a speaker switches back and forth between the two dialects of the language, sometimes even within the same sentence. People speak MSA as a third language if they speak other languages native to

1344-613: A thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis , the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoral culture and patriarchal religion of its speakers. As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through the Indo-European migrations ,

1440-656: A total of 273,989,700 second language speakers in the world. They add: "In most Arab countries, only the well-educated have adequate proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic." People who are literate in Modern Standard Arabic are primarily found in countries of the Arab League . It is compulsory in schools of most of the Arab League to learn Modern Standard Arabic. People who are literate in the language are usually more so passively , as they mostly use

1536-417: A verb) instead of noun phrases and semi-sentences, as well as avoiding phrasal adjectives and accommodating feminine forms of ranks and job titles. Because MSA speech occurs in fields with novel concepts, including technical literature and scientific domains, the need for terms that did not exist in the time of CA has led to coining new terms. Arabic Language Academies had attempted to fulfill this role during

1632-498: Is lenited . Masculine nouns take no special inflection, but feminine nouns have a slenderized dual form, which is in fact identical to the dative singular. Languages of the Brythonic branch do not have dual number. As mentioned above for Middle Welsh, some nouns can be said to have dual forms, prefixed with a form of the numeral "two" (Breton daou- / div- , Welsh dau- / deu- / dwy- , Cornish dew- / diw- ). This process

1728-576: Is a pluricentric standard language taught throughout the Arab world in formal education , differing significantly from many vernacular varieties of Arabic that are commonly spoken as mother tongues in the area; these are only partially mutually intelligible with both MSA and with each other depending on their proximity in the Arabic dialect continuum . Many linguists consider MSA to be distinct from Classical Arabic (CA; اللغة العربية الفصحى التراثية al-Lughah al-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā at-Turāthīyah ) –

1824-422: Is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants ( p and f ) that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a common parent language . Detailed analysis suggests a system of sound laws to describe the phonetic and phonological changes from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have become so detailed and reliable as to support

1920-551: Is added to the end of any noun to indicate that it is dual (regardless of how the plural is formed). It is also present in Khoisan languages that have a rich inflectional morphology , particularly Khoe languages , as well as Kunama , a Nilo-Saharan language . Many languages make a distinction between singular and plural : English, for example, distinguishes between man and men , or house and houses . In some languages , in addition to such singular and plural forms, there

2016-504: Is also a dual form, which is used when exactly two people or things are meant. In many languages with dual forms, the use of the dual is mandatory as in some Arabic dialects using dual in nouns as in Hejazi Arabic , and the plural is used only for groups greater than two. However, the use of the dual is optional in some languages such as other modern Arabic dialects including Egyptian Arabic . In other languages such as Hebrew ,

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2112-504: Is becoming increasingly simpler, using less strict rules compared to CA, notably the inflection is omitted, making it closer to spoken varieties of Arabic. It depends on the speaker's knowledge and attitude to the grammar of Classical Arabic, as well as the region and the intended audience. Pronunciation of native words, loanwords, and foreign names in MSA is loose. Names can be pronounced or even spelled differently in different regions and by different speakers. Pronunciation also depends on

2208-572: Is believed to have had an elaborate system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes (analogous to English child, child's, children, children's ) as well as ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved in English sing, sang, sung, song ) and accent . PIE nominals and pronouns had a complex system of declension , and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation . The PIE phonology , particles , numerals , and copula are also well-reconstructed. Asterisks are used by linguists as

2304-485: Is considered normative; a few contemporary authors attempt (with varying degrees of success) to follow the syntactic and grammatical norms laid down by classical grammarians (such as Sibawayh ) and to use the vocabulary defined in classical dictionaries (such as the Lisan al-Arab , Arabic : لِسَان الْعَرَب ). However, the exigencies of modernity have led to the adoption of numerous terms which would have been mysterious to

2400-582: Is despite the number of academies regulating Arabic). It can be thought of as being in a continuum between CA (the regulated language described in grammar books) and the spoken vernaculars while leaning much more to CA in its written form than its spoken form. Regional variations exist due to influence from the spoken vernaculars . TV hosts who read prepared MSA scripts, for example in Al Jazeera , are ordered to give up national or ethnic pronunciations by changing their pronunciation of certain phonemes (e.g.

2496-401: Is generally treated separately in non-Arab sources. Speakers of Modern Standard Arabic do not always observe the intricate rules of Classical Arabic grammar. Modern Standard Arabic principally differs from Classical Arabic in three areas: lexicon, stylistics, and certain innovations on the periphery that are not strictly regulated by the classical authorities. On the whole, Modern Standard Arabic

2592-416: Is not fully productive, however, and the prefixed forms are semantically restricted. For example, Breton daouarn (< dorn "hand") can only refer to one person's pair of hands, not any two hands from two different people. Welsh deufis must refer to a period of two consecutive months, whereas dau fis can be any two months (compare "fortnight" in English as opposed to "two weeks" or "14 days";

2688-530: Is not homogeneous; there are authors who write in a style very close to the classical models and others who try to create new stylistic patterns. Add to this regional differences in vocabulary depending upon the influence of the local Arabic varieties and the influences of foreign languages, such as French in Africa and Lebanon or English in Egypt, Jordan, and other countries. As MSA is a revised and simplified form of Classical Arabic, MSA in terms of lexicon omitted

2784-550: Is not possible. Forming an exception, Phrygian is sufficiently well-attested to allow proposals of a particularly close affiliation with Greek, and a Graeco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly accepted. Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include: The vowels in commonly used notation are: Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic ( MSA ) or Modern Written Arabic ( MWA )

2880-615: Is quite common in Levantine Arabic , for instance كيلوين kilowain meaning "two kilograms", dual forms are generally not used in Maghrebi Arabic , where two units are commonly expressed with the word زوج zuʒ , as in زوج كيلو zuʒ kilu meaning "a pair of kilograms", with the noun appearing in singular. In Biblical , Mishnaic , and Medieval Hebrew , like Arabic and other Semitic languages , all nouns can have singular, plural or dual forms, and there

2976-413: Is shown in pointed text with a pathach; in a purely consonantal text, masculine dual is not indicated at all by the consonants. The dual for (two) days is יוֹמַ֫יִם ‎ with pathach under the mem. An example of the dual form is יום / יומיים / ימים ‎ yōm / yomạyim / yāmīm "day / two days / [two or more] days". Some words occur so often in pairs that the form with the dual suffix -ạyim

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3072-490: Is still a debate whether there are vestiges of dual verbal forms and pronouns. However, in practice, most nouns use only singular and plural forms. Usually ־ים ‎ -īm is added to masculine words to make them plural for example ספר / ספרים ‎ sēfer / səfārīm "book / books", whilst with feminine nouns the ־ה ‎ -ā is replaced with ־ות ‎ -ōṯ . For example, פרה / פרות ‎ pārā / pārōṯ "cow / cows". The masculine dual form

3168-631: Is the only form of Arabic taught in schools at all stages. Additionally, some members of religious minorities recite prayers in it, as it is considered the literary language . Translated versions of the Bible which are used in Arabic-speaking countries are mostly written in MSA, aside from Classical Arabic. Muslims recite prayers in it; revised editions of numerous literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times are also written in MSA. The sociolinguistic situation of Arabic in modern times provides

3264-424: Is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family . No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language , and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during

3360-479: Is the variety of standardized , literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages also the variety of spoken Arabic that approximates this written standard. MSA is the language used in literature , academia , print and mass media , law and legislation , though it is generally not spoken as a first language , similar to Contemporary Latin . It

3456-448: Is used in practice for the general plural, such as עין / עינים ‎ ʿạyin / ʿēnạyim "eye / eyes", used even in a sentence like "The spider has eight eyes." Thus words like ʿēnạyim only appear to be dual, but are in fact what is called "pseudo-dual", which is a way of making a plural. Sometimes, words can change meaning depending on whether the dual or plural form is used, for example; ʿayin can mean eye or water spring in

3552-572: Is used to form the plural of some body parts, garments, etc., for instance: In this case, even if there are more than two, the dual is still used, for instance יש לכלב ארבע רגליים yesh lə-ḵélev arbaʿ ragláyim ("a dog has four legs "). Another case of the pseudo-dual is duale tantum (a kind of plurale tantum ) nouns: In Nama , nouns have three genders and three grammatical numbers . The non-Khoe Khoesan languages ( Tuu and Kx'a ), do not have dual number marking of nouns. The category of dual can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European ,

3648-465: Is widely used in Sanskrit, as noted above. Its use is mandatory when the number of objects is two, and the plural is not permitted in this case, with one exception (see below). It is always indicated by the declensional suffix (and some morphophonemic modifications to the root resulting from addition of the suffix). For nouns, the dual forms are the same in the following sets of cases, with examples for

3744-558: The Indian subcontinent became aware of similarities between Indo-Iranian languages and European languages, and as early as 1653, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families: Germanic , Romance , Greek , Baltic , Slavic , Celtic , and Iranian . In a memoir sent to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux ,

3840-591: The Neogrammarian hypothesis : the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception. William Jones , an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal , caused an academic sensation when in 1786 he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit , Greek , Latin , Gothic , the Celtic languages , and Old Persian , but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to

3936-573: The genitive forms of uncer for first person and incer for second person. The dual lasted beyond Old English into the Early Middle English period in the Southern and Midland dialects. Middle English saw git evolve into ȝit , and inc can be seen in various different forms including ȝinc , ȝunc , unk , hunk , and hunke . The dual mostly died out in the early 1200s, surviving to around 1300 only in

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4032-891: The neuter gender does not have a dual form. Austronesian languages , particularly Polynesian languages such as Hawaiian , Niuean , and Tongan , possess a dual number for pronouns but not for nouns, as nouns are generally marked for plural syntactically and not morphologically. Other Austronesian languages, particularly those spoken in the Philippines , have a dual first-person pronoun; these languages include Ilokano ( data ), Tausug ( kita ), and Kapampangan ( ìkatá ). These forms mean "we", but specifically "you and I". This form once existed in Tagalog ( katá or sometimes kitá ) but has disappeared from standard usage (save for certain dialects such as in Batangas ) since

4128-478: The 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and its daughter languages , and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method ) were developed as a result. PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from approximately 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age , though estimates vary by more than

4224-669: The Arabic language against linguistic corruption. It was the lingua franca across the Middle East and North Africa during classic times and in Al-Andalus before classic times. Napoleon 's campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801) is generally considered to be the starting point of the modern period of the Arabic language, when the intensity of contacts between the Western world and Arabic culture increased. Napoleon introduced

4320-511: The East Midland dialect. In a small number of modern English dialects, dual pronouns have independently returned. These include: Gothic retained the dual more or less unchanged from Proto-Germanic. It had markings for the first and second person for both the verbs and pronouns, for example wit "we two" as compared to weis "we, more than two". Old Norse and other old Germanic languages, like Old English, had dual marking only in

4416-569: The North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic. Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of a Paleo-Balkan language area, named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of the Balkan peninsula . Most of the other languages of this area—including Illyrian , Thracian , and Dacian —do not appear to be members of any other subfamilies of PIE, but are so poorly attested that proper classification of them

4512-638: The Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe. Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis , which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginning c. 7500–6000 BCE, the Armenian hypothesis , the Paleolithic continuity paradigm , and the indigenous Aryans theory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible within academia. Out of all the theories for

4608-526: The Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian languages due to early language contact , as well as some morphological similarities—notably the Indo-European ablaut , which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian. The Lusitanian language was a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between present-day Portugal and Spain . The Venetic and Liburnian languages known from

4704-457: The Quran in its original language. Written Classical Arabic underwent fundamental changes during the early Islamic era, adding dots to distinguish similarly written letters and adding the tashkīl (diacritical markings that guide pronunciation) by scholars such as Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali and Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi to preserve the correct form and pronunciation of the Quran and to defend

4800-668: The ancestor of all Indo-European languages , and it has been retained as a fully functioning category in the earliest attested daughter languages. The best evidence for the dual among ancient Indo-European languages can be found in Old Indo-Iranian ( Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan ), Homeric Greek and Old Church Slavonic , where its use was obligatory for all inflected categories including verbs, nouns, adjectives, pronouns and some numerals. Various traces of dual can also be found in Gothic , Old Irish , and Latin (more below). Due to

4896-602: The common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833, he began publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend , Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German . In 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as Grimm's law as a general rule in his Deutsche Grammatik . Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of

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4992-465: The concept of "we two here" as contrasted to "we". Nenets , two closely-related Samoyedic languages , features a complete set of dual possessive suffixes for two systems, the number of possessors and the number of possessed objects (for example, "two houses of us two" expressed in one word). The dual form is also used in several modern Indo-European languages, such as Irish , Scottish Gaelic , Slovene , and Sorbian (see below for details). The dual

5088-484: The conversation. Many Semitic languages have dual number. For instance, in Hebrew יים ‎- ( -ayim ) or a variation of it is added to the end of some nouns, e.g. some parts of the body (eye, ear, nostril, lip, hand, leg) and some time periods (minute, hour, day, week, month, year) to indicate that it is dual (regardless of how the plural is formed). A similar situation exists in classical Arabic, where ان -ān

5184-402: The dual exists only for words naming time spans (day, week, etc.), a few measure words , and for words that naturally come in pairs and are not used in the plural except in rhetoric: eyes, ears, and so forth. In Slovene , the use of the dual is mandatory except for nouns that are natural pairs, such as trousers, eyes, ears, lips, hands, arms, legs, feet, kidneys, breasts, lungs, etc., for which

5280-673: The dual in Ancient Greek. In classical Greek, the dual was lost, except in the Attic dialect of Athens , where it persisted until the fifth century BC. Even in this case, its use depended on the author and certain stock expressions. In Koine Greek and Modern Greek , the only remnant of the dual is the numeral for "two", δύο , dýo , which has lost its genitive and dative cases (both δυοῖν , dyoīn ) and retains its nominative/accusative form. Thus it appears to be undeclined in all cases. Nevertheless, Aristophanes of Byzantium ,

5376-455: The dual number of the present tense, called laṭ lakāra: (In Sanskrit, the order of the persons is reversed.) The one exception to the rigidness about dual number is in the case of the pronoun asmad (I/we): Sanskrit grammar permits one to use the plural number for asmad even if the actual number of objects denoted is one or two (this is similar to the "royal we"). For example, while ahaṃ bravīmi , āvāṃ brūvaḥ and vayaṃ brūmaḥ are respectively

5472-488: The dual number through their development. Its function has mostly been replaced by the simple plural. They may however show residual traces of the dual, for example in the English distinctions: both vs. all , either vs. any , neither vs. none , and so on. A commonly used sentence to exemplify dual in English is " Both go to the same school. " where both refers to two specific people who had already been determined in

5568-411: The dual number, using different words for groups of two and groups greater than two is not uncommon. English has words distinguishing dual vs. plural number, including: both / all , either / any , neither / none , between / among , former / first , and latter / last . Japanese , which has no grammatical number, also has words dochira ( どちら , 'which of the two') and dore ( どれ , 'which of

5664-491: The dual was also present in verbal inflection where the syncretism was much lower. Of living Indo-European languages, the dual can be found in dialects of Scottish Gaelic , but fully functioning as a paradigmatic category only in Slovene , and Sorbian . Remnants of the dual can be found in many of the remaining daughter languages, where certain forms of the noun are used with the number two (see below for examples). The dual

5760-582: The effects of hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of cuneiform tablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879 on the basis of internal reconstruction only, and progressively won general acceptance after Jerzy Kuryłowicz 's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite. Julius Pokorny 's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave

5856-514: The expression beide ("both") is equivalent to, though more commonly used than, alle zwei ("all two"). Norwegian Nynorsk also retains the conjunction korgje ("one of two") and its inverse korkje ("neither of two"). A remnant of a lost dual also survives in the Icelandic and Faroese ordinals first and second, which can be translated two ways: First there is fyrri / fyrri / fyrra and seinni / seinni / seinna , which mean

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5952-524: The first and second of two respectively, while fyrsti / fyrsta / fyrsta and annar / önnur / annað mean first and second of more than two. In Icelandic the pronouns annar / önnur / annað ("one") and hinn / hin / hitt ("other") are also used to denote each unit of a set of two in contrast to the pronouns einn / ein / eitt ("one") and annar / önnur / annað ("second"). Therefore in Icelandic "with one hand" translates as með annarri hendi not með einni hendi , and as in English "with

6048-408: The first must, but the second and third need not, be a single consecutive period). The modern Welsh term dwylo (= hands) is formed by adding the feminine (and conjoining) form of 'two' ( dwy ) with the word for 'hand' — llaw becoming lo as it is no longer in a stressed syllable. In Proto-Germanic , the dual had been entirely lost in nouns, and since verbs agreed with nouns in number,

6144-512: The foremost authority of his time (early 2nd century BC) on grammar and style, and a staunch defender of "proper" High Attic tradition, admonishes those who write δυσί ( dysí ) (dative, plural number) rather than the "correct" δυοῖν ( dyoīn ) (dative, dual number). The dual was lost in Latin and its sister Italic languages . However, certain fossilized forms remained, for example, viginti (twenty), but triginta (thirty),

6240-631: The language in reading and writing, not in speaking. In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, French is the language of higher education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), while in the Gulf region it is English. Several reports mentioned that the use of Modern Standard Arabic is on the decline in the Arab world, especially in Gulf countries , such as the United Arab Emirates , where foreign workers make up more than 80% of

6336-654: The main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. Slavic: Russian , Ukrainian , Belarusian , Polish , Czech , Slovak , Sorbian , Serbo-Croatian , Bulgarian , Slovenian , Macedonian , Kashubian , Rusyn Iranic: Persian , Pashto , Balochi , Kurdish , Zaza , Ossetian , Luri , Talyshi , Tati , Gilaki , Mazandarani , Semnani , Yaghnobi ; Nuristani Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages include Italo-Celtic , Graeco-Aryan , Graeco-Armenian , Graeco-Phrygian , Daco-Thracian , and Thraco-Illyrian . There are numerous lexical similarities between

6432-444: The many regional dialects derived from Classical Arabic spoken daily across the region and learned as a first language , and as second language if people speak other languages native to their particular country. They are not normally written, although a certain amount of literature (particularly plays and poetry, including songs) exists in many of them. Literary Arabic (MSA) is the official language of all Arab League countries and

6528-409: The masculine noun bāla (boy): In Sanskrit, adjectives are treated the same as nouns as far as case declensions are concerned. As for pronouns, the same rules apply, except for a few special forms used in some cases. Verbs have distinct dual forms in the three persons in both the ātmanepada and parasmaipada forms of verbs. For instance, the root pac meaning "to cook", takes the following forms in

6624-516: The middle of the 20th century, with kitá as the only surviving form (e.g. Mahál kitá , loosely "I love you"). The dual was a standard feature of the Proto-Uralic language , and lives on in the Samoyedic branch and in most Sami languages , while other members of the family like Finnish , Estonian , and Hungarian have lost it. Sami languages also feature dual pronouns, expressing

6720-534: The most popular. It proposes that the original speakers of PIE were the Yamnaya culture associated with the kurgans (burial mounds) on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea. According to the theory, they were nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse , which allowed them to migrate across Europe and Asia in wagons and chariots. By the early 3rd millennium BCE, they had expanded throughout

6816-456: The numeral two: e.g. deulin (from glin "knee"), dwyglust (from clust "ear"). In the modern languages, there are still significant remnants of dual number in Irish and Scottish Gaelic in nominal phrases containing the numeral dhá or dà (including the higher numerals 12, 22, etc.). As the following table shows, dhá and dà combines with a singular noun, which

6912-491: The obsolete words used in Classical Arabic. As diglossia is involved, various Arabic dialects freely borrow words from MSA. This situation is similar to Romance languages , wherein scores of words were borrowed directly from formal Latin (most literate Romance speakers were also literate in Latin); educated speakers of standard colloquial dialects speak in this kind of communication. Reading out loud in MSA for various reasons

7008-493: The other hand" is með hinni hendinni . An additional element in Icelandic worth mentioning are the interrogative pronouns hvor / hvor / hvort ("who / which / what" of two) and hver / hver / hvert ("who / which / what" of more than two). Among the Baltic languages , the dual form existed but is now nearly obsolete in standard Lithuanian . The dual form Du litu was still used on two- litas coins issued in 1925, but

7104-484: The person's education, linguistic knowledge, and abilities. There may be sounds used which are missing in Classical Arabic but exist in colloquial varieties. For example, the consonants / v / , / p / , / t͡ʃ / (often realized as [ t ] + [ ʃ ] ) (which may or may not be written with special letters) and the vowels [ o ] , [ e ] (both short and long). There are no special letters in Arabic to distinguish between [e~i] and [o~u] pairs but

7200-498: The personal pronouns and not in the verbs. The dual has disappeared as a productive form in all the living languages, with loss of the dual occurring in North Frisian dialects only quite recently. In Austro-Bavarian , the old dual pronouns have replaced the standard plural pronouns: nominative es , accusative enk (from Proto-Germanic * jut  and * inkw , * inkwiz ). A similar development in

7296-543: The plural form ( 2 litai ) is used on later two-litas coins. Proto-Indo-European language Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Proto-Indo-European ( PIE )

7392-508: The plural form has to be used unless one wants to stress that something is true for both one and the other part. For example, one says oči me bolijo ('my eyes hurt'), but if they want to stress that both their eyes hurt, they say obe očesi me bolita . When using the pronoun obe / oba ('both'), the dual form that follows is mandatory. But the use of "obe (both)" is not mandatory since "očesi (two eyes)" as it is, implies that one means both eyes. Although relatively few languages have

7488-744: The pronoun system can be seen in Icelandic and Faroese . Another remnant of the dual can be found in the use of the pronoun begge ("both") in the Scandinavian languages of Norwegian and Danish , bägge in Swedish and báðir / báðar / bæði in Faroese and Icelandic. In these languages, in order to state "all + number", the constructions are begge to / báðir tveir / báðar tvær / bæði tvö ("all two") but alle tre / allir þrír / allar þrjár / öll þrjú ("all three"). In German,

7584-426: The proto-Indo-European language. By the early 1900s, Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages added to the corpus of descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: the laryngeal theory , which explained irregularities in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as

7680-757: The realization of the Classical jīm ج as [ ɡ ] by Egyptians), though other traits may show the speaker's region, such as the stress and the exact value of vowels and the pronunciation of other consonants. People who speak MSA also mix vernacular and Classical in pronunciation, words, and grammatical forms. Classical/vernacular mixing in formal writing can also be found (e.g., in some Egyptian newspaper editorials); others are written in Modern Standard/vernacular mixing, including entertainment news. According to Ethnologue , there are no native speakers of Modern Standard Arabic, but

7776-428: The regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (the Indo-European sound laws ), morphology, and vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the known ancient Indo-European languages. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages. PIE

7872-452: The scarcity of evidence, the reconstruction of dual endings for Proto-Indo-European is difficult, but at least formally according to the comparative method it can be ascertained that no more than three dual endings are reconstructible for nominal inflection. Mallory & Adams (2006) reconstruct the dual endings as: The Proto-Indo-European category of dual did not only denote two of something: it could also be used as an associative marker,

7968-530: The second half of the 20th century with neologisms with Arab roots, but MSA typically borrows terms from other languages to coin new terminology. MSA includes two sounds not present in CA, namely / p / and / v / , which occur in loanwords. MSA is loosely uniform across the Middle East as it is based on the convention of Arabic speakers rather than being a regulated language which rules are followed (that

8064-674: The set of correspondences in his prize essay Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse ('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued that Old Norse was related to the Germanic languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance languages. In 1816, Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit , in which he investigated

8160-559: The singular, but in the plural eyes will take the dual form of ʿenayim whilst springs are ʿeynot . Adjectives, verbs, and pronouns have only singular and plural, with the plural forms of these being used with dual nouns. In Modern Hebrew as used in Israel , there is also a dual number, but its use is very restricted. The dual form is usually used in expressions of time and number. These nouns have plurals as well, which are used for numbers higher than two, for example: The pseudo-dual

8256-583: The singular, dual and plural forms of "I say" and "we say", vayaṃ brūmaḥ can be used in the singular and dual sense as well. The dual can be found in Ancient Greek Homeric texts such as the Iliad and the Odyssey , although its use is only sporadic, owing as much to artistic prerogatives as dictional and metrical requirements within the hexametric meter . There were only two distinct forms of

8352-512: The so-called elliptical dual . For example, the Vedic deity Mitrá , when appearing in dual form Mitrā́ , refers to both Mitra and his companion Varuṇa . Homeric dual Αἴαντε refers to Ajax the Greater and his fighting companion Teucer , and Latin plural Castorēs is used to denote both the semi-god Castor and his twin brother Pollux . Beside nominal (nouns, adjectives and pronouns),

8448-505: The sounds o and e (short and long) exist in the colloquial varieties of Arabic and some foreign words in MSA. Modern Standard Arabic, like Classical Arabic before it, has three pairs of long and short vowels: /a/ , /i/ , and /u/ : * Footnote: although not part of Standard Arabic phonology, the vowels /eː/ and /oː/ are perceived as separate phonemes in most of modern Arabic dialects and they are used when speaking Modern Standard Arabic as part of foreign words or when speaking it with

8544-479: The third person dual form of verbs was also lost. The dual therefore remained only in the first and second person pronouns and their accompanying verb forms. Old English further lost all remaining dual verbs, keeping only first and second person dual pronouns. The Old English first person dual pronoun was wit in the nominative and unc in the accusative , and the second person equivalents were git and inc respectively. The West Saxon dialect also had

8640-462: The three or more'), etc. 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), and its use can be mandatory in some dialects, and not mandatory in others. Likewise, Akkadian had

8736-593: The two forms to be two historical periods of one language. When the distinction is made, they do refer to MSA as Fuṣḥā al-ʻAṣr ( فصحى العصر ), meaning "Contemporary Fuṣḥā" or "Modern Fuṣḥā", and to CA as Fuṣḥā at-Turāth ( فصحى التراث ), meaning "Hereditary Fuṣḥā" or "Historical Fuṣḥā". Classical Arabic , also known as Quranic Arabic, is the language used in the Quran as well as in numerous literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries). Many Muslims study Classical Arabic in order to read

8832-526: The words ambo / ambae (both, compare Slavic oba ), duo / duae with a dual declension. Reconstructed Proto-Celtic nominal and adjectival declensions contain distinct dual forms; pronouns and verbs do not. In Old Irish , nouns and the definite article still have dual forms, but only when accompanied by the numeral * da "two". Traces of the dual remain in Middle Welsh , in nouns denoting pairs of body parts that incorporate

8928-761: The written language prior to the mid-19th century – although there is no agreed moment at which CA turned into MSA. There are also no agreed set of linguistic criteria which distinguish CA from MSA; however, MSA differs most markedly in that it either synthesizes words from Arabic roots (such as سيارة car or باخرة steamship ) or adapts words from foreign languages (such as ورشة workshop or إنترنت Internet ) to describe industrial and post-industrial life. Native speakers of Arabic generally do not distinguish between "Modern Standard Arabic" and "Classical Arabic" as separate languages; they refer to both as Fuṣḥā Arabic or al-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā ( العربية الفصحى ), meaning "the most eloquent Arabic". They consider

9024-475: Was a common feature of all early Slavic languages around the year 1000. In Modern Standard Arabic , as well as in Classical Arabic , the use of dual is compulsory when describing two units. For this purpose, ان -ān is added to the end of any noun or adjective regardless of gender or of how the plural is formed. In the case of feminine nouns ending with ة ta marbuta , this letter becomes

9120-445: Was established in 1828: the bilingual Turkish-Arabic Al-Waqa'i' al-Misriyya had great influence in the formation of Modern Standard Arabic. It was followed by Al-Ahram (1875) and al-Muqattam (1889). The Western–Arabic contacts and technological developments in especially the newspaper industry indirectly caused the revival of Arabic literature, or Nahda , in the late 19th and early 20th century. Another important development

9216-653: Was the establishment of Arabic-only schools in reaction against the Turkification of Arabic-majority areas under Ottoman rule . Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the literary standard across the Middle East , North Africa and Horn of Africa , and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations . Most printed material in the Arab League —including most books, newspapers, magazines, official documents, and reading primers for small children—is written in MSA. "Colloquial" Arabic refers to

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