Haha, we'll have fun, don't worry.

Why does our PM wear a rubbish bag while in office?

My friend told me today that the PM is religious.

I had no idea.

Haha, a rubbish bag, indeed!

He is usually fairly well dressed.

@nohat I’m guessing the FATHER–BOTHER merger is talking about the CLOTH vowel being replaced by the FATHER vowel. But in COT–CAUGHT, is COT supposed to be the FATHER vowel or the CLOTH vowel? I have the same vowel in CAUGHT and CLOTH, which I think is actually /ɔ/ not /ɒ/ for me, and the same vowel in FATHER and COT, which I again think is /ɑ/ not /ɒ/. My conjecture is that no American has a three-way distinction between /ɔ, ɒ, ɑ/. I don’t think I have /a/ anywhere, but am unsure.

Trying to look younger than he is, and succeeding.

Well, the bible says to sell all your things and give the money to the poor, so maybe that's what he did.

Hahaha.

Save for a few items, like rubbish sacks.

That must be it!

@Mahnax Oh, they aren’t that bad.

Perhaps they are just pedestrian sacks, not rubbish ones.

Still, the message is unclear. Does he want to tell us that even he is worth nothing, as a mere mortal?

Maybe he just didn't feel like dressing up.

Is he telling us that he's rubbish in particular?

@Mahnax I'm afraid he thinks this is hip.

@Cerberus …oh dear.

Yeah.

Does anyone know of a specifically Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, or South African English-language corpus that is publicly accessible?

I do not.

Pity.

Do David and Mr S. count as corpora?

Good thing Latin had no dual.

Why good?

Because otherwise I’d have to learn some new form for corpus/corpora in that particular case.

Hi @Reg.

There may have been a dual in archaic Latin...

Ahoys.

Hi.

For years I thought oxen was an OE dual, but it wasn’t. It’s more complicated than that, but it was still a real plural.

Did Proto-Germanic have a dual?

Pretty sure PIE did.

Dunno when it stopped. OE did.

> Ox is the only word in general Eng. use which retains the orig. plural -en, OE. -an, of the weak declension. An older umlaut pl. œxen, exen occurs in O.Northumb., whence app. exin, exon in 15th c. A new pl. oxes occurs 14-16th c., but has not survived. The genitive sing. oxes for oxan appears in Lindisf. Gosp. With the northern owse, owssen, cf. Dutch and Flem. os, ossen.

So it was a plural of the weak declension.

What is ossen in Dutch? A plural?

Yes.

Regular plural.

Das, dassen; vos, vossen; etc.

Is this Old English?

Yes.

Pronouns had a dual.

I can’t see that verbs did.

The dual is infrequent in Greek.

I think it sounds a bit...poetic.

I don’t know how frequent it was in PIE.

It doesn’t seemed to have lasted long.

In Greek, dual forms are like "hmm I have seen this form before, but I don't know exactly what it is, so it must be dual" for me.

The things is, other things take its place. I grew up with a distinct sg/dl/pl distinction for the you pronoun, in that you couldn’t use “you all” or “you guys” when “you two” or “you both” was called for.

Two people cannot be “you all” to me, any more than they can be “all of you”.

Yeah.

Texan does not preserve, or observe perhaps, that distinction.

But how are singular and "dual" distinguished, then?

For me, or for Texans? They have no dual.

If you would like, if you two/both would like, if you guys/all would like.

I can use a bare you as a plural, but usually qualify it so it is clear, retaining you for the singular.

I have not thought this through, mind you.

It doesn’t work as a dual though, because it feels singular.

In Texan, second-person singular is y’all, and second-person plural is all y’all, and there is no dual.

At least, it can work like that in Texan. Ask @MετάEd.

Are you sure you would most of the time use "you two/both" instead of "you" for two people?

Oddly, "we two" and "we both" are rarer.

No, I am not sure.

But I notice when people do not do so, so I must use it more than they do.

Right?

I'm not so sure.

I think if they just say you, one wonders whether they are talking to both of you or just to the one they are looking at.

Because you will notice when it is you who has to resolve the ambiguity.

Right, and when I am speaking, I know whether I mean 1, 2, or many, so do not feel the urge to resolve.

Maybe.

In Dutch, we struggle with the problem whether the plural second-person polite pronoun is U or jullie.

You don’t do it always, just enough to clarify.

@tchrist Exactly. So it's hard to tell.

What is the struggle?

@tchrist That's what I would expect: in many situations, it isn't necessary.

You lot is clearly plural. :)

@tchrist Jij = regular singular you. U = polite singular you. Jullie = regular plural you.

I grew up with a brother close to me in age. Mom was always saying "you two" about things. It was sticky.

So how about polite plural you?

Traditionally, it must be U too.

But many people nowadays incorrectly use jullie.

Does this change verbs?

Yes.

French is also missing a form. They have only three.

Three?

I see only two.

tu = 2nd singular familiar, vous = 2nd singular formal or 2nd plural either.

So vous does three jobs.

And tu but one.

But French often loses things in the plural.

So they have only two forms.

You lose gender on articles.

Ok.

Portuguese has tu and você, but vocês has replaced vos. There is always o sinhor for the really formal.

That's long.

Si o senhor quer uma coisa. . . ?

Sorry.

I don’t know whether a four-fold distinction long lasts in a language. It seems to collapse often enough.

English survives with just one, without much trouble.

One ends up using a lot more sirs though.

If you need anything...?

Basically.

If you will want anything.

@tchrist There is some trouble, or y'all wouldn't have gained as much popularity as it has.

quer being future subjunctive. They use it with their if clauses where English or Spanish uses simple present.

Ah.

The -r is odd.

Hm, the town of Earlston was once spelt Ercildoune. Whoosh!

@tchrist There's "y'all", and "youse", and "yinz" ... all invented by the Irish, supposedly, because they missed the second person plural from the Old Country.

@Cerberus Hm, actually, quer is present indicative. It is funny though, yes.

Notice it is in red here.

Future subjunctive is the quisiere forms, so quiser in Portuguese.

@MετάEd Of which only the first is heard in Tejas.

@tchrist I think it must be zero inflection.

That would explain it.

Well, it is that they are dropping the -e.

I don’t know why.

Exactly.

I am often surprised to hear Italians drop final e’s, too.

That is common enough, dropping an -e at the end.

Or at least, say them so as I cannot hear them.

Especially in the south, yes.

Or so I have heard.

The “Italian” spoken at opposite ends of the boot is surprisingly different from each other.

> Old English, Old Norse, and the other old Germanic languages had dual marking only in the personal pronouns, but not in the verbs.

> There is no dual verb form; dual pronouns agree with plural verbs.

Softies.

At least Greek had fairly complete dual verbs.

Including imperative and middle.

But not many natural-dual things, no?

What do you mean?

It wasn’t used for things there just happened to be two of for the nonce as much as for things that naturally came in pairs, no?

Like you might not use it for a couple of horses in the stall, but you might for a pair of oxen yoked together to plow.

Or do I misunderstand or overstate?

Could be.

I think it is a bit rhetorical, so any random occurrence of two things of no consequence would be less likely to be dual.

So, in that sense, it is probably more common with eyes or oxen than with horses in a stable.

I think it is very often metri causa.

Oh.

That is what you meant by rhetorical.

Like the various epithets that Homer would use to fill out the meter.

@tchrist By rhetorical, I did not mean metri causa. Two different potential reasons.

Because it sounded fancier kinda rhetorical then?

Yes. Or at least that is my hypothesis.

@Cerberus If you do not yet know about this, I rather think you might like it.