Ambo legēre?

Abstract

As is well known, the grammatical description of Latin originated from, and remained firmly based on that of Greek. Due to the structural differences that exist between both languages, this transfer occasionally led to categorial ‘frictions’, which in turn gave rise to metalinguistic or ‘metagrammatical’ observations of a specifically contrastive nature. As with the ‘optative’ and the ‘article’, this is also the case with the ‘dual number’. Greek inherited this marker for mostly ‘natural’ pairs from Proto-Indo- European, and could apply it to nouns, pronouns and verbs, designating it in grammatical description by the collocation δυϊκὸς ἀριθμός. Latin, by contrast, never possessed the dual number as a category in its own right, although it contained ‘formal relics’ of it, namely the numerals duo and ambō. In Latin grammaticography, these two forms (categorized either as ‘nouns’ or as ‘pronouns’) were evident candidates for being designated instances of the dualis numerus after the example of Greek. A second group frequently labelled ‘dual’ by Latin grammarians are those verb forms in -ēre (e.g. legēre) which are today known as ‘contracted’ or ‘syncopated’ alternatives (although they are actually primary from a historical point of view) for the third person plural past perfect tense in -ērunt (e.g. legērunt). This paper discusses the varied range of interpretations formulated by Latin grammarians up to the early Middle Ages with regard to these two groups of forms