[HN Gopher] Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of Engli...
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Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
Author : eigenspace
Score : 172 points
Date : 2026-04-09 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| markus_zhang wrote:
| For anyone curious as me:
|
| git means You two.
| stoneman24 wrote:
| I wonder how it evolved into the modern British slang of "git".
| To quote Wikipedia [0]
|
| "modern British English slang, a git (/gIt/) is a term of
| insult used to describe someone--usually a man--who is
| considered stupid, incompetent, annoying, unpleasant, or
| silly.".
|
| And " Git is a popular open-source software for version control
| created by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds jokingly named it "git"
| after the slang term, later defining it as "the stupid content
| tracker"."
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)
| talideon wrote:
| There appears to be nothing linking Old English "git" with
| Modern English "git". Also, OEng "git" would've been
| pronounced more like "yit".
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > Torvalds jokingly named it "git" after the slang term,
| later defining it as "the stupid content tracker"."
|
| I think the better Torvalds quote was when he said "I name
| all my projects after myself"
| OneLeggedCat wrote:
| I (an American) had only heard the slang version in Holy
| Grail, and didn't know the slang meaning, and finally am now
| seeing your comment. Now to lookup the meaning of "manky..."
| vintermann wrote:
| "Listen baby, they're playing uncer song..."
|
| "Git should get a room!"
| rbonvall wrote:
| Of course. It's distributed.
| frogulis wrote:
| Boy that unc/uncer looks tantalisingly close to modern German
| uns/unser. Wiktionary seems to have it descending from a
| different PIE root, _ns vs_ nh -- I'm not at all familiar with
| PIE though.
| shakna wrote:
| n is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The
| prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces
| have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language.
| There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)
|
| "n-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.
|
| So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".
|
| "n-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine"
| >.
|
| So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".
|
| But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German
| maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways.
| Though... Welsh is closer.
| z500 wrote:
| I've never heard of it being based on that root before. Do
| you have a source?
| shakna wrote:
| The two big ones for discussing Germanic languages and
| their inheritance would probably be:
|
| "From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic", Ringe.
|
| And the simpler "Lexikon der indogermanischen Partikeln und
| Pronominalstamme", Dunkel.
|
| Both use "n-s-ero-", though in the more traditional
| /'un.se.raz/ form.
| zahlman wrote:
| I feel like nasal sounds being associated with negation must
| be even older than PIE.
| eigenspace wrote:
| That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english
| are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes
| surprising to see these false-friends.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Contrary to what GP said, they're not false friends. They're
| a (lost) part of English's Germanic roots, shared with modern
| German.
|
| Edit: Check out the Proto-Germanic personal pronouns.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proto-
| Germanic_person...
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Oh, you mean "Falsche Freunde"?
|
| I have no idea how to say that idiomatically in German, but
| it struck me that those are both "true" friends.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Same with Ic - Ich
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| As a born German, now more native English speaker (left at 8),
| I agree. But, unless I'm very wrong, uns/unser in modern German
| is not restricted to 2 people either - it can mean 2 or more,
| as in "unsere Gemeinde" (our church, referring to something
| shared by hundreds of people)?
| kmm wrote:
| Curiously, Old English unc is actually not related to German
| uns, at least, not after the Germanic language family had
| already formed. Old English at some point underwent a sound
| change[1] where the -n- sound disappeared before fricatives
| (sounds like s, f, v, z, sh, etc...). So "us" comes from an
| older common form "uns", which German inherited basically
| unchanged. This sound change also explains other
| correspondences between English and German where the n is
| missing, like mouth-Mund, tooth-Zahn, other-ander, goose-Gans
| or five-funf.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_nasal_spirant_law
| nhgiang wrote:
| You two add
|
| You two commit
|
| You two push
| u2git wrote:
| u2 add u2 commit u2 push
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Us3
| huijzer wrote:
| Also sad is the fact that "you" is now used for "thee" and "thou"
| and such. The older variants could distinguish between "you"
| plural and "you" singular
| ksherlock wrote:
| W'all have got y'all for plural you.
| thechao wrote:
| You, y'all (small close group), y'all all (larger, further
| group), and "all y'all" -- Southeast Texas (coastal) dialect
| form that showed up about 25 yrs ago. I suspect it might've
| been there all along, but only became acceptable at that
| point?
|
| Another 100+ years, and this'll be some solid grammar.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Don't forget you'uns or yinz!
|
| I struggled with this when I was a school teacher. English
| lacks a good way to clarify you are addressing a group vs
| one person, which comes up a lot in a classroom. "Class,
| you..." is clunky, "You guys..." has obvious issues, and
| y'all or any other contraction is generally considered bad
| grammar. I generally went with y'all. Kids would laugh
| about it, but that seemed to help get their attention.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Surely, you knew all of your students' names and if you
| were addressing one person, you could've used their name.
| Addressing the class as merely "class" seems adequate as
| well. I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation
| where you are forced to use "you" ambiguously.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| What if you're addressing part of the class, though? Like
| "y'all in the back, you need to get back to your work".
| dfxm12 wrote:
| "You in the back" has the same level of specificity.
| Other options include (again) naming names or calling out
| a more specific location "You in the back row".
| madcaptenor wrote:
| No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one
| person in the back, instead of several. So "y'all in the
| back" is more specific. (Of course names are an option in
| this context.)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _(Of course names are an option in this context.)_
|
| Yes, this is a case where you aren't forced to use "you"
| ambiguously in that context.
|
| _No, because "you in the back" could refer to just one
| person in the back, instead of several._
|
| If you meant to address one person, you'd have said that
| one person's name, instead of voluntarily introducing
| ambiguity to the situation. Context & body language also
| makes this obvious. If you meant one person, you'd be
| making eye contact with one person instead of a group of
| people, etc. Students also know if they're paying
| attention or not. "The back" is not a specific area.
| teddyh wrote:
| "Now, chat, settle down."
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| That has to be more than 25 years
|
| I grew up in Houston saying all that in the 80s
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's probably closer to 250 years than 25.
| thechao wrote:
| Same here, frankly. I just didn't want to make an
| aggressive generalization that I couldn't support. I've
| got _video_ of the usage from 2001.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Before I moved to the South I (a non-Southerner) did not feel
| comfortable saying "y'all". But "you guys" seemed sexist. I
| have since spent a decade in the South and I have not picked
| up much of the dialect, but I definitely say "y'all" now.
|
| "W'all" would be nice to have. I guess it's not a thing
| because it sounds too much like the things that separate
| rooms.
| saltcured wrote:
| Have you yet progressed to y'all being singular and all
| y'all being plural?
| madcaptenor wrote:
| No. As far as I can tell, singular "y'all", when it
| exists, is an implied plural. What you might hear as
| singular "y'all" is, say, when you go into a restaurant
| and say "do y'all have Coke?" to the server - that
| doesn't refer to just the server but to the restaurant as
| a whole. But I'm not a linguist and also I don't spend
| much time among people with heavier Southern dialect, so
| you shouldn't believe what I say.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No, you've got it right. A lot of people trying to be
| cute and make southern language seem more alien than it
| is are over-"correcting."
|
| When southern people say y'all to one person, they're
| really addressing you _and your family_ (even though you
| might be the only one there.) If I ask "how y'all
| doing?" I want to know how you and yours are doing.
| macintux wrote:
| > If I ask "how y'all doing?" I want to know how you and
| yours are doing.
|
| I just want people to stop asking me how I'm doing if
| they don't care.
|
| It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that
| "How's it going" is a greeting, not an interrogative, and
| I want that change undone forever.
| saltcured wrote:
| What's interesting is you may reply, "hey, how are you?",
| and lots of people may be satisfied with that. Neither
| party actually answers how they are, yet the handshake is
| complete.
| macintux wrote:
| I refuse out of principle, but agree, that works.
|
| I just use "Howdy".
| ptmcc wrote:
| Which is short for "How do you do?"
| macintux wrote:
| Good point! I guess my principles only extend so far.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Don't forget to end the conversation with "God be with
| ye". Or "A Dios".
| saltcured wrote:
| I've had it explained to me as a western/eastern divide
| among southerners. As you head through Texas, more people
| think you need "all y'all" for plurals.
|
| That's something those western southerners told me. I
| don't know if a linguist would agree, but that seems to
| be the understanding of some actual language users...
|
| All I know is that there is a second boundary somewhere
| through TX, NM, and AZ, because I've never met a native
| Californian who would say "y'all" non ironically.
| lamasery wrote:
| "Guys" (without a "the" in front of it) is
| uncontroversially gender-neutral in most contexts in at
| least some parts of the US. I'm not sure whether folks
| worried about it are from places where it's definitely not,
| or places where it's not used much at all so they're not
| aware that it's a non-issue in (at least many) places where
| it is.
|
| I do prefer "y'all", though. I think it's the best one
| we've got, of the options ("yous" being another big one,
| and ew, gross)
|
| I also love the nuance of "y'all" and "all y'all".
| chadd wrote:
| i tried to stop using y'all when i got my first job at
| MSFT, having grown up in the South; then 10 years later I
| realized it's perfect for Corporate America given it's
| gender neutral
| madcaptenor wrote:
| meanwhile, my New Jersey-born boss uses "you guys"
| despite herself being female and having lived in the
| South longer than I have
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I grew up saying it and consciously eradicated it around
| 3rd grade. I probably shouldnt've but it would seem
| forced to do it now.
| EvsCB wrote:
| Forms of it persists in regional dialects, its not super common
| anymore but in Yorkshire I still here "dees" and "thas", "yous"
| also persist as another form of the plural you.
| eigenspace wrote:
| I found this article quite interesting, and couldn't help but
| feel there's something that's emotionally lost when we got rid of
| the dual-forms. The example from Wulf and Eadwacer where "uncer
| giedd" was translated to "the song of the two of us".
|
| Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > Somehow that just doesn't land the same.
|
| I fear that a modern colloquial rendering would disappoint yet
| further: our besties tune
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Certes, challenging to translate!
|
| "Our secret song"
|
| "Our shared song" is looser, though context helps.
|
| "They're playing our song" still captures the timeless
| feeling. But is wrong for the poem.
| zukzuk wrote:
| If you found this interesting, you might want to check out The
| History of the English Language podcast.
|
| I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying it. And I can't believe I
| have 195 episodes left.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| If you are interested in Wulf and Eadwacer it is beautifully
| sung here:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6-QagSE7sFY
| iterateoften wrote:
| We still have in English: us-two and you-two and we-two.
|
| Same number of syllables.
|
| Maybe "Song of just us two"
|
| Like it's common to hear "You two better stay out of trouble"
|
| Or "it was us two in the apartment alone..."
|
| Or "them two are pretty good together "
| dghf wrote:
| The Wannadies had to go with "You & Me Song"
| https://youtu.be/t_e_45Szprk?si=4JVZHZzguqm3SFHN
| psychoslave wrote:
| My biggest side project is about grammatical gender in French,
| published as a research project on wikiversity[1].
|
| It did made me go through many topics, like dual,
| exclusive/inclusive group person.
|
| Still in a corner of my head, there is the idea to introduce some
| more pronouns to handle more subtilty about which first person we
| are expressing about[2]. The ego is not the present attention,
| nor they are that thing intertwined with the rest of the world
| without which nothing exists.
|
| [1]
| https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Recherche:Sur_l%E2%80%99exte...
|
| [2] The project does provide an homogenized extended set of
| pronouns with 6 more than the two regular ones found in any
| primary school book. And completing all cases for all nouns is
| the biggest chunk that need to be completed, though it's already
| done by now for the most frequent paradigms.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Another fun pronoun distinction I have seen is having two forms
| of "we" - one including the person you are talking to, and one
| excluding them.
|
| (To clarify this was in Hokkien, not Anglo-Saxon).
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Like "us but not you"? That's mean.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Yeah it iw called the exclusive form lol.
|
| But if you think about it seems normal... "we went to the
| city" is not really mean.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Not when you're delivering an insult to everyone present.
| kzrdude wrote:
| We already use this with "we", it's just not clear from the
| word if 'you' are included or not. Example: "We had eggs for
| breakfast".
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| One way to say this is "present company excluded" as when
| saying: culpability is general in the population, but not to
| accuse those you're speaking to.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| If you're interested in history of English, I'd highly recommend
| the History of English podcast.
| https://historyofenglishpodcast.com
| red_admiral wrote:
| English used to have dual pronouns (what the article is a about),
| proper accusatives and genitives (she/her/hers, who/whom and the
| apostrophe-s genitive are survivors), formal/informal 2nd person
| pronouns (you / thou) and quite a few other things that come up
| when you learn French or Latin.
|
| Yes/No and Yea/Nay used to mean different things too: "Is this
| correct?" could be answered "Yea, it is correct" whereas "Is this
| not a mistake?" could be answered "Yes, it is correct" (which you
| can also parse by taking the 'not' literally).
|
| "Courts martial" and "secretaries general" are examples where the
| original noun-first word order remains.
| triage8004 wrote:
| This sucks because yes its a mistake or no its not a mistake
| both fit
| adammarples wrote:
| they don't fit, because 'yes' was not supposed to be used in
| the context of 'yes it is a mistake', yea was. Having two
| words helped stop that ambiguity.
| card_zero wrote:
| It's confusing because it was stated wrongly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_
| f...
|
| Yes _contradicts_ the negative question. So "Is this not a
| mistake?" should be contradicted with "yes, it is a
| mistake" or affirmed with "no, it is not a mistake".
|
| It's further confusing because we have the idiom of
| suggesting things politely in a tentative manner such as
| _isn 't this a mistake?_ which has lost its sense of
| negativity and has come to mean "this is a mistake, I
| think," as opposed to being parsed literally to mean "this
| is not-a-mistake, I think".
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| I'm trying to parse the extra "not" in archaic holdovers
| vs plain modern English. It seems to carry a subtext.
|
| Modern "Are you happy now?" is said with sarcastic tone,
| to spoil happiness. Would be archaically "Are you not
| happy?" As if to dare contradiction. It's loaded, unlike
| when saying sympathetically "Are you unhappy?"
|
| Others:
|
| "Are you not entertained?" "Are you not the very same
| Smith that dwelt at Haversham?" "Prick me, do I not
| bleed?"
|
| But commonly: "Are you not a Christian?" most likely
| seems direct, but said in a formal sense, "rhetorically",
| an exhortation to act like one.
| stevula wrote:
| I thought courts martial and secretaries general (and Knights
| Templar/Hospitaller, et al) were Anglo-Norman/French
| borrowings. Do you have any examples of native English phrases
| following that pattern?
| doobiedowner wrote:
| Whoppers junior
| brandonhorst wrote:
| AirPods Pro :)
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Light fantastic
| drewstiff wrote:
| Hards on
| zoky wrote:
| Passersby
| gerdesj wrote:
| A relative presided over a couple of court martials (1) in
| the past. Modern usage has largely disconnected it from the
| past, grammatically (if that is even a thing, except to the
| true minutaephile)!
|
| (1) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/court-martial-
| res...
| pdpi wrote:
| The formal/informal second person thing is fascinating to me as
| a Portuguese speaker.
|
| European Portuguese, like many (most?) Romance languages, has
| the informal/formal second person split. Brazilian Portuguese
| has dropped the informal second person (tu) and uses only the
| formal second person (voce).
|
| Now, because "thou" is archaic, it sounds overly stiff, and
| most English speakers assume it was the formal second person,
| but it was actually the informal form. So both Brazilian
| Portuguese and English underwent the same process and chose the
| same way.
| andrepd wrote:
| Also, "voce" is actually not originally a proper formal
| second person. Grammatically, "voce" is a third person
| singular. It comes from "Vossa Merce" (something like "Your
| Mercy" or "Your Grace"), shortened to "vossemece", to "voce".
| The origin, and still today a common gramatical construction
| in Portuguese in any formal or semi-formal register, is to
| use a periphrase in the third person to increase politeness.
| I guess in English it also exists, but only on the most fully
| formal contexts ("Does that right honourable gentleman
| agree...").
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Similarly, Spanish "vuestra merced" evolved to "usted".
| zoky wrote:
| And likewise the Romanian "dumneavoastra" evolved into...
| nothing, that's still the polite form of "you" in
| Romanian. Interestingly though, it can be used in both
| the singular and plural, and takes verbs conjugated
| exactly the same way for both forms (i.e. the second
| person plural).
| esquivalience wrote:
| As in 'please', from 'if you please'?
| Sharlin wrote:
| In English particularly, people associate "thou" with the
| King James Bible and similar Christian texts ("Our Father,
| thou art in Heaven...") and might reasonably assume that if
| "thou" was used to address the literal God, it must have been
| the formal pronoun - but the familial, informal one was used
| exactly because of the "father" association! (OTOH there
| certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where
| children were expected to "vous" their own parents - not sure
| how much of a thing it is these days).
|
| Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know
| "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy
| of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a
| modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| It depends a lot on where you were brought up, and the
| language you were exposed to. My first association would be
| a very Yorkshire, "Thou knowest," rather than the king
| james.
| gerdesj wrote:
| ... thar knows nowt!
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous
| distinction where children were expected to "vous" their
| own parents - not sure how much of a thing it is these
| days).
|
| It's interesting that in Viennese German (my German is
| terrible but I do at least try) it seems like the informal
| form is the default, in a shop I get asked "Braucht du
| hilfe?" rather than the formal "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?".
|
| Maybe this is what they mean when they say people in Vienna
| are rude, but coming from Scotland using informal language
| even in fairly serious settings just seems comfortable and
| normal.
| matt-attack wrote:
| And we've literally born witness to yet another step in the
| trend of diluting our corpus of pronouns. The trend is very
| clearly from more articulate to less.
|
| "They" and "their" for my whole lifetime were plurals. Now
| we've pretty much lost the mere clarity of knowing if the
| pronoun means 1 person or more than 1 person. Was watching
| "Adolescence" and the police mentioned "they" in regards to the
| victim of a crime. I was mistakenly under the impression that
| there weee multiple victims for much of the episode.
|
| I'm very clearly slow to adapt to the new definitions.
| w10-1 wrote:
| The article points out that Chaucer used "they" to refer to
| singular unknown person, so the usage is very old. It seems
| more respectful than assuming they are male.
|
| I find myself wrong all the time, and I'm glad for the
| lesson!
| card_zero wrote:
| Leaning on Chaucer isn't sufficient, because _it_ was once
| a pronoun used for people:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)
|
| So maybe we should bring back _it,_ or ignore Chaucer as an
| authority.
| etskinner wrote:
| "They" has always (in our lifetimes) been used to refer to a
| singular person of unknown gender. For example "someone left
| their coat here. They must be cold"
| the_biot wrote:
| Indeed. What's new is not referring to someone of unknown
| gender as "they", but rather people identifying as non-
| gender-specific, and wanting to be referred to as "they".
| That's the part that feels so awkward, IMHO, not simply
| they as one person.
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| Early Quakers rejected using different 2nd person pronouns for
| different people since it violated their principle of
| egalitarianism so they called everyone thee/thou (and got into
| trouble for it as you might expect).
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/opinion/sunday/pronouns-q...
| dataflow wrote:
| Arabic has dual subject pronouns. I wonder if the concept
| developed independently or if there was any influence somehow?
| Two9A wrote:
| Arabic is on the Semitic branch of the hypothesised proto-Indo-
| European language, which has dual number:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)
|
| So you'd expect to see languages from western Europe to south
| Asia that either have the dual concept, or have an attested
| ancestor that did.
| eigenspace wrote:
| The Semitic language family is not part of the proto-indo-
| european language family. It's from the Afroasiatic family
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Persian is PIE and had influence over semitic languages in
| cultural contact. The connection could be there.
| z500 wrote:
| Egyptian had it, and although it's Afroasiatic it's not
| Semitic, so it must have gone back further than that.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Semitic languages are Afroasiatic, not Indoeuropean.
| another-dave wrote:
| Within Indo-European languages, Irish has the concept of the
| dual. It's used with things that come in pairs like "mo dha
| laimh" - my two hands.
|
| Interestingly, to say one-handed you'd say "leath-lamh",
| where _leath_ means half, so half the <thing that's usually
| one of a pair>.
| malikolivier wrote:
| It should be noted that only Modern Standard Arabic (the modern
| common Arabic language based on the language used in the
| Qur'an) still has dual. Most (if not all?) spoken dialects,
| which evolved from this form of Arabic have already lost dual.
|
| It's interesting that we notice a similar pattern of losing the
| dual in many languages. And it would be very interesting to
| find the opposite pattern: a language where the dual newly
| develops out of nowhere. However, I do not know of such
| language.
| shrubby wrote:
| youtwo commit -m "Refactoring translations"
| pimlottc wrote:
| Pair programming are wit?
| iterateoften wrote:
| Interesting that in English we had special pronoun for plurals of
| exactly 2, but in Russian for instance they have special case
| declensions for plurals less than 5.
|
| Is that significant? I have no idea. Is there a language with
| special case for exactly 2 with another case for a "few" and with
| yet another for "a lot"? Interesting to compare different
| cultures.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| It's not just 5, it's also 21 to 25, 31 to 35 etc. However,
| some Slavic languages (e.g. Slovak and Czech) don't do that,
| and only have those special numerals for under 5.
| stevula wrote:
| Whereas modern English only distinguishes grammatical number by
| singular/plural (and Old English had dual), some languages even
| have trial (three).
|
| Russian distinguishes paucal (few) from plural (many). It's not
| super common but there are some other languages that do it.
| kmm wrote:
| Russian used to have dual pronouns too, but they all were lost
| somewhere in the 13th century, as in all other Slavic languages
| other than Slovenian.
|
| The system used for small numbers is probably a broad extension
| of an earlier dual number for nouns, i.e. something like a
| plural but just for two things. For (some) male nouns, the
| nominative dual ending was the same as the genitive singular,
| which was then extended to all other nouns even when this
| correspondence didn't hold, and from just 2 things to 3 and 4
| as well. Nowadays the dual has been completely forgotten for
| nouns, and the only interpretation of the rule is that it's a
| genitive singular.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Slovene still has the grammatical dual and we still have (and
| use) pronouns that could literally be translated as "we two"
| (midva/midve) and "you two" (vidva/vidve) and so on. I've been
| told it used to be the same in most other Slavic languages.
| nuxi wrote:
| There are still some remnants of this in Serbian and Croatian,
| e.g. the semi-dual "nas dvoje / nas dva".
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