I've been working on a little PHP project at home lately, and stumbled across the :: operator. What's so special about it? It's called "Paamayim Nekudotayim", as you'll discover when you accidentally put a double colon where you shouldn't:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in index.php on line 5
It turns out that "paamayim nekudotayim" is Hebrew for "double colon." And if my Hebrew isn't too rusty, the -ayim ending is the dual marker, making PHP the only programming language in existence that uses the dual number.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at June 13, 2005 06:17 PMThe Russian numbers 2 through 4 are declined differently from both 1 and 5+ but I guess that's not quite the same.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 13, 2005 06:25 PMRussian, being Indo-European, once had a dual as well. You know more of it than I do, though -- is there anything interesting about words like "both" or "between"?
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 13, 2005 06:58 PMI've just had to go back to the dictionaries so, no, I don't speak all that much Russian.
"Both" is "oba" but it's often expressed in language that translates literally as "And x and y," with the first "and" placed where we would use the word "both" in English. (I have a dim idea that the word for "two" -- "dva" -- can also be used to say "the two" where we would say "both," but I may be mistakenly borrowing that idea out of French.)
"Between" is "mezhdu," which also means "among" and I think more literally "in the middle of."
So I guess the only thing interesting about those words might be that "mezhdu" has such varied meanings. Maybe the definition of "mezhdu" was stretched sideways to cover for a missing 'dual'? Dunno. Yr the linguistics guy.
Oba sounds a lot like et ... et ... in Latin or soit ... soit ... in French (albeit there for either/or).
It's not that surprising that mezhdu would be that generic — more surprising to find the different "between"/"among" in English, probably as a fossil of the dual. Probably mezhdu was either "between" or "among" back when the dual number was productive.
Probably need to ask someone who actually knows more than я читаю корову then.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 14, 2005 01:44 PMI'd say the closest to "oba" would be the Spanish "ambos." But that's out of Latin really.
Isn't there a conditional or hypothetical implication to "soit" in that usage -- e.g. "Well, you could pick maybe the blue one or maybe the red one..." -- ?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 14, 2005 03:11 PMPlease forgive this but the headline "Dual Colons" makes me wonder, "How many buttocks, then?"
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at June 14, 2005 04:50 PM