Читать книгу The Latin Dual and Poetic Diction: Studies in Numbers and Figures - Andrew J. Bell - Страница 11

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That the dual existed in Latin, is recognized by Donatus and his school. In Donatus’s Ars we read: Est et dualis numerus, qui singulariter enuntiari non potest, ut hi ambo, hi duo (IV. 376. 23,K.). Servius, in his commentary to Donatus’s Ars, adds that this is why they are irregular in declension; they have dual forms for the nominative, and plural for the oblique cases (IV. 408. 17,K.). To duo and ambo Sergius adds uter and neuter (IV. 540. 7,K.). Later anonymous grammarians under the influence of philosophy seem disinclined to accept the dual: quia non est in natura rerum hic tertius numerus (Ars Anon. Bern., Suppl. 84. 18,K.); sed hunc non recipimus, quia, qui singularitatem excedit, in pluralitate deprenditur (Comm. Einsidl. in Don. Artem, Suppl. 240. 14,K.).

The earlier Roman grammarians like Donatus were fortunately free from this influence, and were determined in their view by the form of duo and ambo; for duo corresponds exactly to the Greek δύο, and ambo, mutatis mutandis, to ἄμφω. Duo is shortened from the older duō by the law of brevis brevians, the same that gives us benĕ and malĕ. Porphyrio’s note to Hor. Sat. 2. 3. 248 is: ludere par impar, uni dui (Cod. Med.); so in the fifth century of our era duo seems to have developed a plural dui, just as δύο developed δοιοί. The φ in ἄμφω is for an older bh (cf. Skt. ubhau); the Roman, who could not aspirate as did the Greek, and down to 150 B.C. wrote Corintus as he pronounced it, for bh wrote b in ambo.

But the Latin grammarians had a further motive for emphasizing the fact that they found a dual in Latin. Latin grammatical studies, Varro tells us, begin in 157 B.C., when Crates of Mallos, sent to Rome as ambassador from King Attalus, while taking a walk on the Palatine, fell and broke his leg. During the inactivity consequent on his accident, he found time to give some attention to the Latin language, which he decided was a depraved derivative of Greek. The circle of the Scipios and the Aemilii eagerly adopted the notion that associated their language with Greek; and grammatical studies of this tendency came into fashion. But a century later Romans were no longer so disposed to accept this view; and it was to refute one Hypsicrates, who wrote from this standpoint, that Varro composed his De Lingua Latina. That Latin is an independent language, he maintains, and points to the number of Latin cases, one more than in Greek, to prove his point. All the older Latin grammarians follow him in this endeavour to show that Latin is at least as rich as Greek in grammatical inflexions. The two forms ambo and duo seem to some of them a narrow basis for their claim of a Latin dual; so we read in Cledonius: et communis est numerus, qui et dualis dicitur apud Graecos, ut species, facies, res (V.10. 19,K.). In assigning genders, when a word had the same form for the male and the female, as ἵππος or homo, the Greeks and Romans agreed that its gender was ‘common’. Cledonius finds that species, facies, res have the same form for the singular and the plural, and so sets up a ‘common number’, equivalent to the Greek dual, he tells us. In this he seems to have found no following.

But the Greek verb also has forms for the dual distinct from the plural forms; and so some Romans claimed that forms like legere, fecere, conticuere were duals (vide Cledonius, V. 60. 6,K.). All Latin usage is against this; Donatus denies that they are duals, and Macrobius, to prove they are not, cites Virgil’s conticuere omnes (Aen. 2.1), and una omnes fecere pedem (5.830). In the Commentum Einsidlense (Suppl. 256. 3,K.) we find legēre confused with the infinitive legĕre: dicimus enim legere volo et legere volumus in singulari numero et in plurali;—another attempt to establish a common number as a dual. Legēre seems the old and genuine form of the third plural perfect, which later, on analogy of the present, became legērunt.

But our great Latin grammarians like Vossius and Ruddiman make no mention of a Latin dual. They seem to have held the grammar of Priscian to be of higher authority than that of Donatus; and Priscian knows nothing of a Latin dual; nor do his sources, Charisius and Diomedes. In A.D. 327 Constantine removed the seat of empire from Rome to Byzantium; and at once the Greeks, who have henceforth to administer Latin law, feel the need of a knowledge of the Latin language. To satisfy this the great grammars of Charisius and Diomedes are composed; and as both are intended to teach Greeks Latin, both state with emphasis that Latin, unlike Greek, has no dual; and Priscian, who like them composed his great work in Constantinople about 150 years later, follows them in this. But Donatus and the older grammarians were right in their claim that there was a Latin dual, and that traces of this number and of forms arising from its presence still exist in Latin.

We may review briefly these traces. Like ambo and duo, octo is the Greek ὀκτώ, the Sanskrit aṣṭau, which Fick thought meant primarily ‘the two points’, i.e. the two hands held out with the thumbs folded into the palms. So viginti is the two tens, like the Greek εἴκοσι (old ϝίκατι) and the Sanskrit viṅçati; and in all three the ending ī is the regular ending of the neuter dual in Sanskrit. Wilamowitz thinks that in the inscription: M. C. Pomplio No. f. dedron Hercole, Pomplio is a dual, and his view is favoured by Leo (Pl. Forsch. 333); and Schulze thinks that in: Q. K. Cestio Q. f. Hercole donu dedero (C.I.L. 14. 2891) Cestio is a dual.

The ending o found in ambo, octo, Pomplio, Cestio, seems the ending in ἵππω and in the Skt. açvau, where the u seems a reduction of the vi- in viginti and means ‘two’. It is the root of the Skt. vidya ‘knowledge’ (cf. scio and descisco), and of the old verb vido found in the compound divide. When we read in Horace:

Hoc iter ignavi divisimus, altius ac nos

Praecinctis unum (Sat. 1. 5. 5-6),

the translation of divisimus induced by its opposition to unum, ‘we made two of’, seems justified by its derivation.

Sommer (Lat. Laut- u. Formenlehre, 424) explains ū in neuters of the fourth declension as got by analogy from the ū in genū and cornu, which are old duals like the Skt. sūnū ‘the two sons’. Cornū = die beiden Hörner = das Gehörn = das Horn. So in English, speaking of the two knees, we use the phrase ‘to bow the knee’. He thinks genūs is for an older genuos, where the ending os is that of the gen.-abl. dual in Skt. Brugmann is inclined to agree that genūs is the old genitive dual, but refuses to accept genu as a nominative dual till he has more evidence that sūnū is an Indo-Germanic form. It is interesting to meet this fresh case of a dual passing into the singular.

But the great majority of Latin forms once dual, if we follow Brugmann, now appear as plurals. Equae is the exact equivalent phonetically of the Skt. açve, and meant primarily ‘the pair of mares’; θύραι is primarily ‘the pair of doors’, and corresponds to a Latin forae still found in the acc. foras and the abl. foris. The later development of the dual in Greek, τὰ κόρα, which has nothing to correspond with it in Sanskrit, confirms this theory. The plural of aśve is aśvās; and in Oscan totas, the plural of tota a city, is evidently formed in the same way. We find traces of this old and genuine plural in Latin; Nonius quotes from Pomponius: quot laetitias insperatas modo mi irrepsere in sinum; under the lemma: accusativus pro nominativo (500. 33,M.). But a comparison with Umbrian and Oscan makes it probable that laetitias here is really the old nominative plural, which was superseded by the dual laetitiae. Still the close connexion of this dual form with the pronominal genitive ending -som makes it likely either that with this dual was associated a form got by analogy from the pronominal plural populoi (=populi), or that this dual was regarded later as a similar pronominal plural. Its association with the pronominal genitive seems even closer than that of the genuine pronominal plural; for in Latin the use of terrarum (old terrasom) for *terrum (old terrom) seems older than that of liberorum for liberum; while in Greek we have the corresponding χωράων, but ἱππόων is not developed.

The adjectives uter and neuter are not duals, but singulars with an ending -ter that associates them with the dual. While the pf. pl. legēre is not a dual, the ending -tis in estis seems to Brugmann a form of the Skt. ending -thas, used for the second dual of primary tenses in the active voice. Still this ending may be the old plural ending -te, still in use in the imperative regite, but changed to regitis in the indicative after the analogy of the second sing., regis. These, then, are the Latin inflexions of nouns or verbs that have been thought dual in origin.