Dual Indefinites – SAE or Common?

[vegfarandi]

European languages tend to have words meaning "both", "either" and "neither" and often "which of the two". Is this typologically common or an areal feature of European languages?

[akam chinjir]

If I remember right, Haspelmath's chapter on coordination in Volume 2 of Language Typology and Syntactic Description (Shopen, ed) has a discussion of at least "both... and" and "neither... nor", and indicates that having a dedicated "neither... nor" is rare. (But I don't remember details, and can't right now check.)

[akam chinjir]

(Actually I seem to recall that "both... and" is itself a fairly uncommon pattern, something analogous to "and... and" being more widespread, fwiw.)

[Salmoneus]

Having an emphatic form of conjunction ('both A and B'), and having a dedicated form for the conjunction of negatives ('neither A nor B'), seem very different, however, and probably much more widespread, than dedicated positive and negative dual qualifiers ('I ate both cats'; 'I ate neither cat') (and not all languages allow qualifiers to be used as pronouns anyway).

And in a language with both the conjunctions and the qualifiers, I don't think there's any particular reason why they'd be homophonous...

[akam chinjir]

I've regained access to the Shopen. His data is mostly European, but he says he's not sure if that's because emphatic coordination of this general sort is less common outside of Europe, or just because his sources for non-European languages don't cover it. He makes this point especially for emphatic negative coordination ("neither... nor"), all his examples of which are European. For all the forms he discusses ("both... and", "either... or", "neither... nor") he gives about as many examples where it's a single conjunction repeated, though it's a small number of cases, and he doesn't generalise.

One interesting pattern: here are a few cases like Korean, where the emphatic construction repeats a form (-to... -to, both... and), but it's not the same word as is used in simple conjunction (-hako, and).

[vegfarandi]

I'm mostly curious about the pronouny words.

I've looked up the word "both" in various online dictionaries and Arabic seems to have a difference between all and both: "kl" vs. "kalaa" – without knowing for sure, those look like they are simply plural and dual forms of the same root and Arabic, at least traditionally, had a dual.

Swahili seems to only have -ote for "all" – for 'both' they say "-ote -bili" 'all two' (- stands for concord prefix).

And Korean seems similar.

So I'm starting to lean towards the answer that having a word "both" is pretty SEA. Wish there was a more scientific study out there about this but I haven't been able to find one.

[MacAnDàil]

Heck, even in French people say 'tous les deux' litt. 'all the two'. So having a separate word for 'both' is possibly even specific to Germanic languages.

'neither' seems to work differently. French has this too.

[Vijay]

Heck, even in French people say 'tous les deux' litt. 'all the two'. So having a separate word for 'both' is possibly even specific to Germanic languages.

Not really. French just lost its word for 'both' (cf. Old French ambe). Even Latin has this word (ambō).

[zompist]

There are two major uses of 'both': (1) 'all of the two' as in "both eyes", (2) part of the "both...and" construction. Spanish ambos can be used for only (1); (2) is tanto X como Y.

Mandarin has liǎng and shuāng, both meaning 'a couple, a pair', and sometimes 'both' (sense 1).

In Quechua, you can say Pidruwan Mariyawan, which I'd translate 'both Pedro and Maria'; however, you can have more conjoints. OTOH there are no conjunctions, so you can't really say 'Pedro and Maria'! Pidru Mariyawan is OK, but here the single -wan is comitative: 'Pedro, with Maria'.

[Xwtek]

Indonesia has dual indefinite.

Baik X maupun Y.

or

X dan Y dua-duanya.

[MacAnDàil]

Heck, even in French people say 'tous les deux' litt. 'all the two'. So having a separate word for 'both' is possibly even specific to Germanic languages.

Not really. French just lost its word for 'both' (cf. Old French ambe). Even Latin has this word (ambō).

I was aware of the word 'ambe' in bingo and the latinate prefix ambi- but not the Old French and I hadn't made the link between the prefix and an actual Latin word. Thanks

[Kuchigakatai]

I've looked up the word "both" in various online dictionaries and Arabic seems to have a difference between all and both: "kl" vs. "kalaa" – without knowing for sure, those look like they are simply plural and dual forms of the same root and Arabic, at least traditionally, had a dual.

Arabic definitely has distinct words for "all" and "both", كل kull 'all, every' and كلا kilaa 'both'. I think we can safely assume they're etymologically related sharing the same root, but no, these are not simply the plural and dual forms of a particular word, the derivational process (CuCC ~ CiCaa) is not clear within a synchronic view of Arabic (though I imagine it might be possibly reconstructable by looking at other Semitic languages, I don't know).

While still IE but not European, Hindi seems to distinguish them as सब sab / सारा sārā 'all' and दोनों donõ 'both'.

[Vijay]

Malayalam distinguishes them, too.

The way you say X and Y in Malayalam, where X and Y are both nouns, is by adding the suffix -[ʊm] to each of them. This is also how you say both X and Y (there isn't a way to say both X and Y that's different from just X and Y in Arabic, Hindi, or Urdu, either, is there?). Apart from that, 'both' in Malayalam is usually [ˈɾəɳɖʊm], i.e. [ˈɾəɳɖɯ] 'two' + -[ʊm] (case suffixes go before -[ʊm]). When referring to people, I've seen [ɾəɳɖɯˈbeːɾʊm] ([peːr] usually means 'name' but in this case just means 'people'). Maybe that's more formal than [ˈɾəɳɖʊm].

[hwhatting]

Among IE languages, dedicated words for "all of the two" are also attested at least in Indo-Iranian (Sanscrit, Old Persian), Ancient Greek, and in Balto-Slavic. If you excuse the self-promotion, I wrote a short paper about this topic which can be found here.

[vegfarandi]

Among IE languages, dedicated words for "all of the two" are also attested at least in Indo-Iranian (Sanscrit, Old Persian), Ancient Greek, and in Balto-Slavic. If you excuse the self-promotion, I wrote a short paper about this topic which can be found here.

Oh no shame in that, this is great!!

[hwhatting]

Glad you like it!

[chris_notts]

I was wondering if, outside of IE, there is an inverse correlation between having definiteness marking and having a dedicated "both". It seems to me that, if you have a definite article, "the two (of)" conveys a similar meaning. Basque uses either biak "the two" or bai ... bai ... "yes ... yes ... ". And even in Spanish "los dos" is often used instead of "ambos" in colloquial speech.

[Richard W]

I was wondering if, outside of IE, there is an inverse correlation between having definiteness marking and having a dedicated "both". It seems to me that, if you have a definite article, "the two (of)" conveys a similar meaning. Basque uses either biak "the two" or bai ... bai ... "yes ... yes ... ". And even in Spanish "los dos" is often used instead of "ambos" in colloquial speech.

Well, we can populate (no, no) with Thai - unless you believe it is an unnatural natural language. (It fails a couple of 'universals').

[hwhatting]

Well, German has beide as well as a definite article, so it counts against your correlation.

[chris_notts]

Well, German has beide as well as a definite article, so it counts against your correlation.

Well, I wasn't claiming it was exception-less universal, just that it might be a tendency perhaps. It was more of a guess than something I have any hard evidence for. And I did say outside IE, since the claim above was that IE as a family favours having "both" in general.