To my understanding, Latin doesn't have a dual number at all. The adjectives duo "two" and ambō "both" have some special forms derived from the PIE dual (-ō, -ābus, -ōbus), but are considered irregular rather than part of any real pattern.
However, from an answer to an unrelated question:
By...
The difference between Plautus and Suetonius is trivial compared with stuff just a couple hundred years before Plautus or a few hundred years after Suetonius.
@Cerberus Justinian, no, but a lot of Christian Latin after Jerome feels pretty different to me.
But yeah, you can get up to the 600s before it really changes. But you can tell the language has already changed, the literature just finally caught up to it.
@JoonasIlmavirta I can't believe how quickly you can find nonsense words. I actually google cemsi and I can't tell if that's a word in any language. The results for the first two pages of results are something in which it's an acronym.
Google Translate (hehe) suggests it's possibly Hindi, but it translates it to Sansi in English, suggesting it thinks it's a spelling mistake.
We don't have them in English from what Wikipedia states.
This is what gives it a longer length, right? The vowel sound and length are short but the syllable becomes long because the final consonant is geminate.
@JoonasIlmavirta I guess my follow up question for you would be, for both, how do you know the o in hoc is short if it's always long in poetry? (As in, "what's the evidence?")The same applies for ac.
@tony My topic was on cannibalism in antiquity. It was not on Latin per se. Most PhDs in Latin aren't focused on the Latin language, but on the literature, society, culture, history, etc. of people who speak and works written in Latin.
@JoonasIlmavirta Ahh, I see. As an anglophone it's hard to not have at least a little bit of aspiration after the C, but making the pause after the stop longer makes sense.
@Adam When pronouncing a stop (T, P, K or their voiced counterparts), there's no sound for most of the time. There's only a sound upon release. For a long stop the pause is long and the release has to wait a bit longer.
I'm glad if it's making some sense. Communicating this over text chat with different native languages is a bit of a challenge.
@Adam The way this kind of thing is taught in language classes is that a teacher makes the sound and comments on how well the students are copying it. The next best thing is to use voice recordings, but it can be hard for an untrained ear to pick certain differences. I know I'm deaf to some distinctions others can make.
There's an site somewhere on the web with recordings of words from various languages. I imagine they would have some minimal pairs on this. I can't remember the name...
Ugh... Latin Wordle thinks niath is a word. That list is beyond belief.
I wonder if there's a tool out there that allows you to play Wordle on your own custom list of words. I'm not really into it for competition and sharing but the occasional little fun, so a local solution would be just fine.
Yea, I'd much rather just use what is actually attested. If the total number of words available is greater than 750 or so then you could go sequentially and not get the same word again for 2 years.
@JoonasIlmavirta It's easy to fork a github branch and make changes; I can fork it to my own repository. I don't think there'd be an easy way for someone to run it in their browser without the code being hosted somewhere, even if the code is all client-side.
Technically github has its own webpages and it could be simply made through them.
@JoonasIlmavirta Most probably don't, or only have certain applications up there for when they want to use version tracking and build collaboratively. Git is yet another gift to us from Linus Torvalds
Github itself is just a service for cloud hosting git repositories
To my understanding, Latin doesn't have a dual number at all. The adjectives duo "two" and ambō "both" have some special forms derived from the PIE dual (-ō, -ābus, -ōbus), but are considered irregular rather than part of any real pattern.
However, from an answer to an unrelated question:
By...
