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Charlotte lotteheartplural/Cinny cinny_heart_plural thetadelta ursaminor treblesand

just noticed something bizarre in upper sorbian

so like if you know a slavic language you might know that the word for eye has an irregular plural, which derives from the old church slavonic word for “two eyes”. since then most slavic languages lost the three-way number distinction

upper sorbian is the exception here which still distinguishes singular/dual/plural fully. so going by conjugation rules you’d have “woko/woce/woca” for 1/2/many eyes yet it’s……“woko/woči/woči” which matches the OCS form again

so that got me wondering: did sorbian maybe lose the distinction at some point and then later redevelop it?

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Inga stands with 🇺🇦 🇵🇸

Edited 15 days ago

@charlotte I know a Slavic language that has three forms of numerals (one for 1/21/31/41/..., another for 2-4/22-24/32-34/..., and a third one for 5-20/25-30/35-40/...), and for old church slavonic word all three forms exist (1 о́ко / 2 о́ка / 5 оче́й, transliterated roughly as woko / woka / wočiej), while ironically for regular modern word for eye in nominative case first and third form are the same (1 глаз / 2 глáза / 5 глаз)

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@IngaLovinde

and for old church slavonic word all three forms exist (1 о́ко / 2 о́ка / 5 оче́й, transliterated roughly as woko / woka / wočiej),

yeah i neglected to mention that

iirc numerals is the other place where remnants of the dual show up in multiple slavic languages

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