# Slovenian: Dual number and romantism



## Tagarela

Hello,

I have read that Slovenian is one of the few modern languages which have the dual number. I also had read that it gives some romantism to the language. What do you say about it? 

Good bye.:


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## skye

I don't know if it gives any romantism to the language, and what exactly you mean by romantism. 

To me it's just another very common feature of our language, just like the six cases, the masculine, feminine and neutral declinations, the word order of lexical words, grammatical words and particles, the double negation and other things. And then there's also the dual number. 

If this gives any romantism to the language would be best answered by non-native speakers, because to me it's just a very mundane and ordinary thing which I use every day. If our teachers hadn't told us that it's so special I wouldn't have even known. However, I don't think Slovenian is perceived as romantic if that's what you had in mind.


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## sokol

skye said:


> If this gives any romantism to the language would be best answered by non-native speakers, because to me it's just a very mundane and ordinary thing which I use every day.



I think Tagarela had his request not phrased in the best way. Anyway, from my point of view - growing up in Austria with having no contact to Slovenian (so not from inside the Slovene minority of Carinthia and Styria) and learning the language as an adult with no attitudes attached to it, I'd like to add some comments to that one.

My teachers certainly put very much emphasis on the dual, but this is only natural as you have to do much more exercises on featurers you don't have in your language than in the ones that are parallel to your mother tongue's. Nevertheless, I really got the feeling that some Slovenes consider their dual as giving their language a 'special status'.

Historically it seems that the existence of the Slovene dual (more precisely: the preservation of it, as of course Old Church Slavonic had it, too) was not insignificant at all for the Slovene nationalism of the 19th century (the 'Romantic' period as it is called in German, or 'Romantic Nationalism'). It was one argument more towards rejecting the 'Illyric' movement and building a modern, new Slovene standard language. (Yes, I know - Slovene wasn't made up from scratch in the 19th century, but all considered 19th century Slovene really was quite different from Trubars language, wasn't it?)

So in my opinion, yes: the dual played it's part in the Slovene 'Romantic Nationalism' period. And some of this still transpires up to our modern times.

One of my teachers, a Carinthian Slovene, certainly felt that the dual is more than 'just a grammatical feature' which you use day in, day out. For him the dual was something special, something not many languages have, some archaic feature with value higher than only the grammatical one.
One probably _could _have called this attitude some kind of romaticism. Or probably only an attitude which grew out of his special minority situation in Carinthia.

Another teacher of mine, a Slovene from Maribor, didn't seem to share this attitude to the same extent - but then we students weren't so close to her as to the other teacher as she kept more her distance, while our Carinthian teacher told us anecdotes from his life.
So, no definite answer from me; only some impressions, and the viewpoint that at least some leftovers of the 19th centuries attitudes still are alive.


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## Outsider

Tagarela said:


> I have read that Slovenian is one of the few modern languages which have the dual number.


One of the few modern _Indo-European_ languages with a dual number. The dual is not unusual in other language families, from what I understand.


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## Tagarela

Hi,

Thank you all for your answers. 

Well, my question was in the sense of love feeling, since, if I am not wrong, you could talk better about 'two persons', because one could separte 'we two' from 'we all'. 
About if it is something greater or not - for sure, as it happens in many languages - this kind of feature is frequently used to say that one language is more interesting than other and so on. 


Outsider, o, sorry. I have heard of some non-Indo European which also have it. 

Good bye.:


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## sokol

Tagarela said:


> Well, my question was in the sense of love feeling, since, if I am not wrong, you could talk better about 'two persons', because one could separte 'we two' from 'we all'.



In this case, Tagarela, I've misunderstood you.

My answer to this one clearly would be: no, there isn't such a thing. Why should it be more 'romantic' to use dual to loved ones? And I think that Slovene native speakers will agree with me on that - but of course feel free to correct me.

Apart from that, the "we too" (that is, in grammar, the incusive we) also could be expressed in many languages not having the dual (any more). In Austrian German this certainly is possible, even though no dual exists (except for a very few fragments in dialects).


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## zigaramsak

I’m native too and can’t really say. I think normally the dual is just as common and neutral as plural, since we use it in all occasions – including for non-living objects, and not only when we want to be romantic.

However, I’ve noticed that we more often say “se vidimo” (see you - plural) instead of “se vidiva” (see you - dual) to someone who is not exactly our loved one. Are we afraid that it might sound too “romantic”? Maybe, I don’t know.


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## skye

Tagarela said:


> Hi,
> 
> Thank you all for your answers.
> 
> Well, my question was in the sense of love feeling, since, if I am not wrong, you could talk better about 'two persons', because one could separte 'we two' from 'we all'.
> About if it is something greater or not - for sure, as it happens in many languages - this kind of feature is frequently used to say that one language is more interesting than other and so on.
> 
> 
> Outsider, o, sorry. I have heard of some non-Indo European which also have it.
> 
> Good bye.:


 
I guess you couldn't say that Slovenian is more romantic than other languages just because of that. 

But you can play with dual in that way too.  I think there's also a collection of love poems called "Midva" - "We two", but I don't remember who the author is.


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## skye

sokol said:


> Historically it seems that the existence of the Slovene dual (more precisely: the preservation of it, as of course Old Church Slavonic had it, too) was not insignificant at all for the Slovene nationalism of the 19th century (the 'Romantic' period as it is called in German, or 'Romantic Nationalism'). It was one argument more towards rejecting the 'Illyric' movement and building a modern, new Slovene standard language. (Yes, I know - Slovene wasn't made up from scratch in the 19th century, but all considered 19th century Slovene really was quite different from Trubars language, wasn't it?)
> 
> So in my opinion, yes: the dual played it's part in the Slovene 'Romantic Nationalism' period. And some of this still transpires up to our modern times.


 
I think that the German spoken or written in the time of Luther probably differed from the German in the time of Brentano and von Arnim and all those other romantic authors too. 


In my Slovene classes I was told that Slovene is one of the few languages that have dual, I don't know if the teachers emphasized Indo-European or not, but all of them also told us that through natural lingustic development dual will most likely become obsolete one day and that we can already see the first signs of this.


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## sokol

skye said:


> I think there's also a collection of love poems called "Midva" - "We two", but I don't remember who the author is.


I think I know them, when I learnt Slovenian we definitely were confronted with a poem with lots of duals in it.
But I can't find it now, and Google only leads me to Ciril Zlobec of whom, however, I can't find a version of his publication 'Jaz - ti - midva' on the www.



skye said:


> I think that the German spoken or written in the time of Luther probably differed from the German in the time of Brentano and von Arnim and all those other romantic authors too.


 Oh yes, certainly does!
And if one would learn his German from the authors of the romantic period then one would have to face serious communications problems if trying to get by with this language nowadays. 



skye said:


> In my Slovene classes I was told that Slovene is one of the few languages that have dual, I don't know if the teachers emphasized Indo-European or not, but all of them also told us that through natural lingustic development dual will most likely become obsolete one day and that we can already see the first signs of this.


Ah, here we've got it, what I wrote about in my previous post.

Yes, this fits very well with what I remember from my Slovene classes at university.
(About dual becoming obsolete some time in the future - this may well depend. If it keeps being an important marker for style in communication it will survive; if not, then maybe not. But as already written above, there are other languages where the distinction between "inclusive we" and "exclusive we" exists even though there's no dual, and nevertheless this distinction also seems to survive very well and fulfill a function. But as most other Slavic languages only have fossilised residuals of the dual left, if at that, it's not unlikely the same could happen to Slovenian.
I've also had the impression, when learning Slovene, that it was very important for my teachers to use the dual correctly - as if this weren't the case _exactly _in Slovenia.)


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## skye

The use of dual seems to be less consistent in certain dialects, but in mine it's normal to use it. I don't even think about it. The only instance where I use plural instead of dual is the already mentioned "se vidimo" or "gremo", but both of these seem more like phrases without much meaning to me.


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