There is little doubt that the dual form in Old English had a secondary function aside from referring to two people. This paper rejects the claim that this secondary function is to imply a familial...Show moreThere is little doubt that the dual form in Old English had a secondary function aside from referring to two people. This paper rejects the claim that this secondary function is to imply a familial or intimate bond between the two referents and asserts instead that the dual functioned to limit the number of referents to prevent confusion. This assertion is given credit by the fact that not all incidences of dual pronouns in Old English gloss, verse, and prose imply such familial or intimate bonds. Old English is in an uncommon position in the Indo-European family tree, because only first and second person pronouns may be duals, but the two referents of the pronoun are permitted to be different sexes and the form is not mandatory when speaking of two people. All of these aspects cause people in intimate relationships to be more common referents for dual pronouns, even if these relations do not cause the dual pronouns to happen.Show less
When a noun irregularly has the regular endings of one gender in the singular and those of a different gender in the plural, it is said to belong to an inquorate gender. This thesis assembles a...Show moreWhen a noun irregularly has the regular endings of one gender in the singular and those of a different gender in the plural, it is said to belong to an inquorate gender. This thesis assembles a corpus of nouns displaying this behavior in Latin and groups them into four inquorate genders. Then for each noun it investigates the purported causes of their abnormal gender in an attempt to find if each of the inquorate genders has a single cause. After examining each noun, it is argued that none of the four inquorate genders has a single cause. It is also argued that for some of the nouns, the previous explanations for their origin are incorrect.Show less