Re: Devanagari handwriting?

J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 23:23:53 +0200, Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...> wrote:
>
>
>>Pascal A. Kramm wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>They just bear it, same as with amny other over-complicated thing in
>>>Sanskrit not found in most other languages (e.g. dual case).
>>
>>Hmm. You meant dual number, didn't you? It's not as rare as you may think.
>>It was present in Old Russian (its remnants are still found in all East
>>Slavic lgs as a "counting form", to be used with numerals 2, 3 and 4 in
>>Nom. and Acc.), Old English (in personal pronouns), florishes in Hebrew
>>and Arabic etc.
>
>
> There's also a relict of the former presence of a dual in German: The
> Bavarian dialect pronoun for the second person plural isn't based on the
> plural of old, but of the dual of old: they say "enk", not "ihr".
The same is true of Icelandic, with the added frill that the
old dual pronouns are used as the ordinary first and second person
plural pronouns, while the old plurals are used as honorific
pronouns (although now only used when addressing the president
and the bishop -- and I doubt even the latter refers to himself
as _vér_ anymore! :)

--

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)