I learned about the dual in my early undergraduate years, when I started to study Greek and Elvish at about the same time. (Yes, I know what must be going through your mind, kind reader: how is this leaf was to accept into your paintings a guy who decides to study Greek and Elvish at the same time?)
But let’s get back to the dual. The word rhymes with “plural”, and it’s no accident. Those who speak Portuguese are used to thinking that there is only singular and plural, “the girl” or “the girls”, and that’s it. However, other languages—both real, like Ancient Greek, and imaginary, like the Elvish languages invented by JRR Tolkien—have specific forms to designate not one or many, but two things, usually those that seem to pair naturally or by custom. Athenians of Plato’s time (and Elves) refer to “my hands” or “my sandals” using the dual, not the plural.
My first encounters with this unprecedented possibility skewed my perspective, however. I kept thinking that the dual was a privilege of the so-called classical languages, those that, like the Hellenic language, belong to the past of “Western high culture” (whatever that may be).
The Trumai, however, shot this prejudice of mine in the heart.
It is an isolated language, that is, unrelated to any other language known today. Its native speakers live in Mato Grosso, in the Xingu Indigenous Territory. In Trumai, when one uses the mark of the dual—a simple “a”—along with a personal name, grammatical magic happens: “Yakaikiru a” means the woman named Yakaikiru and her “natural match,” meaning her husband.
Finesse like this can be found everywhere in the more than 150 indigenous languages that are still spoken on Brazilian soil. The native linguistic diversity is much higher than this raw number implies, because we are talking about several different language families living together here, as far apart as Arabic differs from Russian or Chinese distances itself from African languages.
Despite the wide variations in vocabulary and sound, it’s nice to see how some patterns are more common. One is verbal serialization—the ability to create a “superverb” in which a few syllables describe a complete scene, a mental comic strip. In the Hup language, spoken on the Upper Rio Negro (border with Colombia), a verb serialized as “tiy-his’ap-b’uyd’äh-yë” —six syllables, by my count— is equivalent to the following: “He pushed [a porta, subentendido] until he broke it, threw it aside, and went in.”
Another very interesting concern in many languages has to do with the perspective and quality of the “evidence” (to use a scientific term) on the part of the speaker. In Sanöma, one of the languages spoken by the Yanomami, statements are accompanied by so-called evidentials: “ki” if the speaker himself witnessed what he is saying, “tha” if he has not seen him personally, and “noa” if he is making a logical inference ( like someone who says “You’ve been sunbathing” when seeing an acquaintance with sunburned skin).
I wouldn’t be able to imagine this kind of grammatical property on my own even if I spent the rest of my life thinking. The fact that they exist is a powerful testament to different ways of conceiving reality—and proof that there are no such things as “primitive” languages or cultures.
PS – The examples of Brazilian indigenous languages I mentioned come from the book “Índio Não Fala Só Tupi” (published by 7Letras), organized by Bruna Franchetto and Kristina Balykova. The work is a small treasure that deserves to be better known and read.
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