Dual as a grammatical category, lecture for the Zagrebački lingvistički krug (Zagreb Linguistic Circle)

During her three-month training in Croatia (University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences), Tjaša Jakop from the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language ZRC SAZU gave an invited lecture entitled Dvojina kao gramatička kategorija (Dual as a grammatical category) as part of the lectures and book presentations of the Zagrebački lingvistički krug (Zagreb Linguistic Circle), which is organized by the Društvo sveučilišnih nastavnika (Association of College Teachers).

The lecture dealt with the category of number, focusing on the dual in Slovene and in Slovene dialects from the 16th century onwards. We also mentioned the dual in Old Croatian, where dual forms began to blend with plural forms from the beginning of the 14th century; dual forms remained longest in remote areas, e.g. on the Adriatic islands. We showed that dual is indeed a heritage of the margins: 1) in South-Slavic language group it has been preserved in Slovene only; 2) in Slovene dialects it has been best preserved in all inflectional word types of the Prekmurje dialect.