dvandva
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A dvandva ('pair' in Sanskrit) is a linguistic compound in which multiple individual nouns are concatenated to form a compound word to form a new word with a distinct meaning. For instance, the individual words 'brother' and 'sister' may in some languages be agglomerated to 'brothersister' to express "siblings". The grammatical number of such constructs is often plural or dual.
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Encyclopedic overview
8 sectionsContents
- Sanskrit
- Itaretara dvandva
- Samāhāra dvandva
- Ekaśeṣa dvandva
- In Japanese
- See also
- References
- External links
A dvandva ('pair' in Sanskrit) is a linguistic compound in which multiple individual nouns are concatenated to form a compound word to form a new word with a distinct meaning. For instance, the individual words 'brother' and 'sister' may in some languages be agglomerated to 'brothersister' to express "siblings". The grammatical number of such constructs is often plural or dual.
The term dvandva was borrowed from Sanskrit, a language in which these compounds are common. Dvandvas also exist in Avestan, the Old Iranian language related to Sanskrit, as well as in numerous Indo-Aryan languages descended from the Prakrits. Several far-eastern languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Atong (a Tibeto-Burman language of India and Bangladesh) and Korean also have dvandvas. Dvandvas may also be found occasionally in European languages, but are relatively rare.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “dvandva” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.