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Talk:Dual (grammatical number)

The original text said 'In Sami' that refer to the people, not the language. So I elaborated that by adding Sami people, and added Lappish for better understanding on what people this refer to. (Yes I am a speaker of Lappish and we do indeed use dualis both as a separate word, and this also change the grammatical form.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.208.187.46 (talk) 21:13, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Locative and the Dual in Croatian
I have to point out the error of saying "In Croatian, Serbian, and Sorbian, the forms given are for the genitive, since there is no locative form." - There is a locative form for nouns in Croatian. Example: N. vuk G. vuka L. vuku I don't know about Sorbian, but I'm pretty sure Serbian also has a locative form. Delete?

Also to the poster below me. All Slavic languages retained the dual in noun form (be it different forms or just accentual), Croatian and Serbian also (1 vuk, 2 vuka, 3 vuka, 4 vuka, 5 vukova...), but only the Slovene has the verb form, and a different form for 2, apart from 3 and 4. Kerebald (talk) 12:49, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

BCS duals: Within the BCS group, the recent official standards really do not include now any true dual, but historically it existed at least in Bosnia and Croatia, and in non-standard Croatian dialects dual well persisted also up to nowadays, as follows:
 * In former šćakavian texts on the Bosnian script (bosančica) a dual partly similar to Slovene (and Chakavian) sporadically occured.
 * In former Croatian texts on the Glagolitic script, dual was also present resembling Slovene and Chakavian.
 * In Kaykavian texts and in its actual speakers, dual is almost absent and replaced by plurals (despite the partial similarity of Kaykavian dialect to Slovene).
 * In the coastal Chakavian being my native idiom (my speciality: dialectology), dual is now alive, being similar to Slovenian duals: I use it often in private speaking with family. Dual disappeared in eastern half-Chakavians of the Dalmatian mainland under the pression of Shtokavian standard, but it survives westwards in Istra peninsula and islands. E.g. the attested former dual of 20th century now disappeared at Pazin, Novi, Rab, etc. However it survives well in minor hamlets of Vinodol valley (Bribir-Grižane), also at Buzet and Baška, etc. The archaic duals in northern Adriatic islands are very peculiar, with complete declension and ending in masculine on -oj, feminine -aj, neutrum -ej (different from Slovene and similar to Sorbian).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.136.47.19 (talk) 04:07, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Dual in Czech
Question/comment: I am not a linguist, but Russian and Czech are both my native languages. Since I grew up in the United States, I lack much of the formal education in Russian/Czech languages, so this article was very interesting. I was surprised, however, to see the distinction pointed out in Russian about counting, namely that the words change for 1, then for 2,3,4, and then from 5 on, but not in Czech. Czech is identical in this regard (for example, 1 mesto, 2 mesta, 3 mesta, 4 mesta, 5 mest, 6 mest, ...), and thus it should be pointed out in the article that Czech still uses the dual in this sense (if, as in the Russian section, the dual can be extended in this sense to 3 and 4 as well as 2). If I am missing something, I would be very fascinated if someone could explain. Thanks much.

Merger with Dual number
What about the article "Dual number"? These need a merger.. -Gabbe

Yup. Move the grammatical stuff here, maybe, and leave the other page for maths? -- Tarquin

English both
English 'both'? What about English use of 'both' as opposed to 'all'? Is this some sort of dual number too? --romanm 19:47, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

 * It's a word which generally refers only to two, but it's not really part of a morphological paradigm or set of inflectional forms, so it's not the best example of a grammatical dual. It falls between a word like "pair" and a true paradigmatic dual. AnonMoos 03:54, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

 * Actually 'both' has a morphological paradigm: The words 'both' and 'all' and 'each' (etc.) have special placement, as either before a noun or after, while numerical count numbers would be used mainly before a noun (not after). For example: "He gave money to them both as partners, but he gave them each a car for separate travels" or also: "The girls both thanked him for what he had given them each". The dual number in English does exist, but in limited forms, such as placing the word 'both' after a plural noun phrase or pronoun, rather than appending a special ending other than "-(e)s". Another example: "The husband and wife both are writing text to explain dual forms in English grammar" as an example adding the word 'both' where a plural noun phrase does not add ending "-(e)s" but whole word 'both' for the dual number. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:24, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Explanation for the loss of the dual
Is there any theory why the Indo-European languages have all lost their and gone to a system with only singualr and plural (except for Slovene)? This seems odd to have happened separately and near-universally. Xyzzyva 23:40, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

 * The languages tend to simplify. (Even in informal Slovene the Dual number is sometimes replaced by plural.) komar

 * Not really. It's just that people treat neuter nouns as maculine and use masculine dual (dva stola - dva okna). Other than that, dual is perfectly alive and kicking. Žarišče (talk) 22:02, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Right. Similarly, in most modern Arabic vernaculars, plural forms are used instead, although there are some exceptions and proper Modern Standard Arabic does indeed have dual number.

That's interesting. Why are we going through a phase of simplification in all languages? (The original complexity must have come during an earlier phase when the language got more complicated) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.212.36.211 (talk) 22:12, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
 * In general, the popular language usage tends to simplify many forms, such as formal term "e-mail" (with hyphen "-") spelled on the Internet over 80% "email" and so Google now matches both forms together. Similarly, linguists have noted reduction of hyphens in word "teen-ager" as now "teenager" or diaeresis "coöperative" as "cooperative" (to the point phone spell-correctors fail to recognize "coöp" as a word). Schools have even stopped teaching cursive writing, per the reason ppl who need to write fast would use keyboard entry, perhaps w/ spell-correct. -Wikid77 (talk) 22:01, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Old English
Also, I thought Old English made 100% use of the dual, thus giving us such triads as cow - cyne (modern spelling "kyne") - cows, ox - oxen - oxes, eye - eyen - eyes, child - children - childs, brother - brethren - brethres (modern spelling "brothers"), Node 02:03, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * I don't think so. AFAIR the -en form (oxen, boxen etc) is older, Anglo-Saxon form (cf. German plural) while -s form is newer, Norman form (cf. French plural). rrw

 * Old English had dual forms of first and second person pronouns. Example, ic/wit/we for I/we two/we all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.255.236.207 (talk) 19:44, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

 * Varying noun plurals in Old English are nothing to do with the dual form. Nouns ending "-a" such as oxa ("ox") and several feminine noun forms take an "-n" as their plural.  Some neuter nouns are unchanged in the plural, while others take a "-u".  Some nouns change their vowel.  Most masculine nouns take "-as".  The modern "-s" plural is from Old English, not French, though the latter influence may have strengthened its grip.

 * The dual is found only in the first and second persons (wit, git). It seems to have been dying out throughout the period. Hogweard (talk) 19:03, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Duals in Russian and English
Russian seems to be similar to Serbian in that it uses the genitive singular case for two, three or four of something and then genitive plural case for five or more of something.

Even if it isn't quite a separate dual declension, there certainly is the gramatical awareness of a one/few/many distinction.

Interestingly we use the genitive case in English with collective designations: pair of shoes, herd of cattle, school of fish, class of students, etc. etc. Is this a vestige of duality from proto-Germanic?
 * I put undefined under "Slavic languages". The section now discusses two quite unrelated forms of dual (paucal?):

Duja 13:39, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
 * AFAIK, all Slavic languages (except Bulgarian and Macedonian) use singular genitive forms with numbers 2-4 and plural genitive for 5+ (Slovenian, in addition, pure dual). That should be mentioned as a common characteristics and an example put inside a table covering all/most relevant languages.
 * Other remnants, as with "two eyes" described separately for languages where they're preserved. I did't understand the previous Serbo-Croatian reference to instrumental form, without the example, and I commented it out.

Now, please help me fill in the table, so that we could put it in the article. I selected "wolf" for the reason that it has distinctive pl. and. sg. genitive in Serbo-Croatian (unlike many others). If someone has a better example, it's welcome. Duja 13:39, 16 February 2006 (UTC):

Slovenian: Volk (= engl. "wolf")
I'm not sure what you mean by "dual (2-4)"? Slovenian, which uses the grammatical dual in full, uses it only for the number two:

1 volk (grammatical singular)

2 volkova (grammatical dual)

3 volkovi (grammatical plural)

4 volkovi (grammatical plural)

5 volkov (grammatical plural)

7 volkov (grammatical plural)

8 volkov (grammatical plural)

...and so on...

Without a preceding number, it's "volk" (singular), "volkova" (dual), "volkovi" (plural). Conversationally, "volka" is often used in place of "volkova", but, once again, only for the true dual (not numbers 3-4) WorldWide Update 23:53, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Right, I forgot that Slovenian has pure dual. I'll put that in the table.Duja 14:49, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks/hvala! You got it right. WorldWide Update 23:41, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

 * Still, plural 5+ is not so simple. For 101, 102; 201, 202, ...; 1001, 1002, etc. is similar as in 1 and 2. Besides, for dual it is much more common to correct into dva volka. Ziga 19:36, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I would like to point out a couple of inaccuracies:

 * Slovene "očesa" pushed out "oči" instead, becoming the proper dual (and plural) of "oko").

This is somewhat inaccurate, and the situation is a bit more complicated in practice. The dual and plural form is "oči" when referring to human or animal eyes, and "očesi" (dual) / "očesa" (plural) when referring to other eye-like things.

 * Nominative case of noun "city": singular: 1 mesto dual: 2 mesti plural: 3-4 mesta, 5+ mest

"mest" is not the nominative case of anything -- it's the plural genitive. In Slovenian, the plural genitive is used instead of the plural nominative if the number of things (modulo 100) is 5 or more. 212.235.208.154 07:50, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Merger with Grammatical Number?
I had proposed to merge this page with grammatical number. I think there is information here that could just as well be on the other page. However, I withdrew the suggestion, since I can't commit to this edit right now. :( FilipeS 13:08, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

On second thoughts, this article is probably too large to be merged with grammatical number. FilipeS 19:48, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Examples
I added the examples from german wikipedia. I didn't really understand the bit about the adoption of plural form in Austro-Bavarian, though, so i may have translated it incorrectly.

Grammatical number
The following was in the main article on grammatical number, but I have decided to delete it (see here). I think it's more appropriate for this article, for the reasons explained in the other Talk page. However, since it seems to contain some inaccuracies (see here), I thought it would be better to leave it here, so that it would be corrected by someone who knows Slovene, and added to this article.

Slovene, a Slavic language, is more complicated:

 * Barva (a color) (singular), barvi (two colors) (dual), barve (three or four colors), barv (five and so on)
 * Hiša (house) (singular), hiši (two houses) (dual), hiše (three or four houses) (plural), hiš (five or more houses) (plural)
 * Miš (mouse) (singular), miši (two or more mice) (dual := plural)
 * Jaz (I) (singular), midva/midve (we) (dual + [ Masculine/Feminine gender ] ), mi/me (we) (plural [Ma/Fe gender])
 * Vrata (one door) (singular), dvoje vrat (two doors) (dual), troje vrat (three doors) (plural), [plural noun with different or same form]
 * babine (one afterbirth period) (archaic word) (singular), babini (two afterbirth periods) (dual), babine (three or four afterbirth periods) [plural noun with different or same form], babin (five or more afterbirth periods)
 * Človeštvo (mankind) (singular), človeštvi (two mankind) (dual), človeštva (three or four mankind), človeštev (five or more mankind) [collective noun with different form]

Note:
 * When a number reaches one hundred and one (two) (or several hundred or thousand and so on), singular and dual are used again. (ena knjiga (one book) (singular),dve knjigi (two books) (dual), pet knjig (five books) (plural), sto ena knjiga (101 books) sto dve knjigi(102 books))

 * These and similar examples are very often used incorrectly, even in published or electronic dictionaries.

FilipeS 14:26, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Imperative
My opinion is that the given example for imperative "hoditi (to walk)" is an unlucky one. And that is probably the reason why people continue trying to add the first person indicative form 'hodim'. I would suggest an imperative "pojdi (go)" with the table

and hopefully nobody will try to add the first person indicative form 'pojdem'.

Dual in Slavic
It is inappropriate to talk about a "dual" (or even "paucal") number in Slavic languages other than Slovenian. The article claims that BCS and Russian have a dual, but (i) it is only used with the numerals 2-3-4 and (ii) it is identical to the genitive singular. In fact, it is the genitive singular, not a dual form. For example, Rus. "волкa" cannot be used by itself (say, as the subject of a verb) to mean "2, 3, or 4 wolves"; you have to use "волки" and it just means "wolves (plural)". Moreover there are no special verb forms for agreeing with a dual/paucal subject (as there are in Slovenian); there are only singular and plural verbs. Historically, there might be a connection between the special syntax of 2-3-4 and the lost dual (I have no idea), but the current article makes a much stronger claim.

Numeral phrase syntax in Slavic is very complex and probably deserves an article of its own. The discussion of the dual in Slavic in this article should really only focus on Slovenian, and mention lexical vestiges of old duals in some plural forms (hands, eyes, ears) in the other languages.

CapnPrep 16:49, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

 * I agree. I was a bit surprised to see that the Slovene dual is, in comparison to other Slavic languages, seriosly downplayed - Slovene (along with Sorbic) is afterall the only Slavic language that retains an actual grammatical dual, unlike those other Slavic languages, where some partial vestiges of it remain at best. For starters, I'll move Slovene to the top of the Slavic languages and try to make something out of it's section. Unfortuantely, grammar is not my strong point, so any further help would be more than appreciated. TomorrowTime 09:31, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

 * Ok, some observations.
 * -I realise the list of Slavic languages was meant to be alphabetic and my pushing Slovene up to the top will no doubt disturb some deep cosmic harmony, but I think Slovene more than deserves to be first on the list.
 * -The Sorbian language, one of the three Indo-European langauges with a surviving full dual is not even mentioned. What gives?
 * -The Slovene entry has been considerably shortened. By me. The ridiculous petty assertions in the oh-so-numerous brackets have been either deleted or moved into the text. No brackets, just freedom!
 * -I hereby proclaim that I find the adjective "Slovene" to be better sounding than the adjective "Slovenian". Anybody who would want to hang me for high treason because of this should please discuss that here, not in the article. No brackets, just freedom!
 * -Is there any rule to how examples should be given? I wouldn't mind giving more examples of words and their dual forms, but I'm not sure how to go about this. In fact, all in all this whole article could do with some standardisation - as it is, every language entry is written differently, and it's hard to read.
 * That's all, folks. TomorrowTime 10:00, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

 * I deleted the irrelevant sections on Russian and BCS and part of the Ukrainian. If someone can demonstrate (with references) that the use of the gen. sing. with 2-3-4 has anything to do with dual number, this should be discussed as a general Slavic feature, not repeated for every Slavic language individually (the discussion in above is worth reviving). I salvaged one of the tables for use with Slovene, but I don't know the bare plural form of mesto. CapnPrep 01:25, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

 * Great, looks better already. As for mesto... Hm, the bare plural in nominative would be mesta - this is then inflected for other cases, of course, but I'm not sure if we should go into such details at this stage of the development of the article.
 * Mesto is a neutral noun. I suppose examples of a feminine and masculine noun would be in order here. In trying to keep up with the general architectural feeling I propose the following nouns: cesta (road) for feminine form and dimnik (chimney) for masculine. So: cesta (sing), cesti (dual), cest (3-4), cest (5+), ceste (bare plural, nominative); dimnik (sing), dimnika (dual), dimniki (3-4), dimnikov (5+), dimniki (bare plural, nom).
 * Are the above examples ok? I can always help out with further examples or minor clarifications, but I must confess that grammatical explanations are not my forte. You know how it is with native speakers and grammar :) TomorrowTime 09:52, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Ukrainian
I have just deleted the following section:

====Ukrainian====

Ukrainian dialects (e.g., of the Vinnytsya region) have preserved the dual in feminine nouns: кімната - дві кімнаті - шість кімнат (a room - two rooms - six rooms); рука - дві руці - сім рук (a hand - two hands - seven hands) and in neutral nouns: відро - дві відрі - десять відер (a bucket - two buckets - ten buckets). Verbs have completely lost their dual forms.

In essence, the same is true about Ukrainian and Russian languages overall, not just this dialect. There is a difference between the plural forms for a) two objects and b) five or six or seven objects, but that doesn't make a) a dual. See discussion above. Is the form a) not applicable to three or four objects? Why is there no example that shows that this dialect is any different in this respect? If there were one, it would need to be verified. Sergivs-en 18:14, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

 * I believe the claim is that the form of the noun used with 2-3-4 is distinct from the genitive singular for feminine and neuter nouns. This would be then different from standard Ukrainian (and Russian). But the information would have to be verified (and the text above rewritten, so I agree with your deletion). CapnPrep 21:48, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite
Somme comments on the recent rewrite of this section (which I like, overall): CapnPrep 22:11, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What are the "dual characteristics" of the declension of two that "can be verified" in the first table?
 * There is no single rule for 2-3-4 in the modern Slavic languages that have lost the dual. The article currently suggests that in all of these languages, the genitive singular form of the noun is used to form a nominative NP. This is not true, for example, in Polish, where the nominative plural is used. This rule is also inappropriate for Southern Slavic languages with no case morphology.
 * The "five and above" rule needs to mention higher numerals that end in 1 or 2-3-4 (e.g. twenty-one through twenty-four). Again, there is no single rule valid for all non-dual Slavic languages.
 * This section should be moved into a separate article; it is completely out of proportion with the other languages and language families treated.

Declension table
I still don't get the significance of the table enumerating the inflectional forms of "two" in more and more Slavic languages. If the claim is that the declension pattern of "two" and "both" displays specific dual characteristics, this has to be shown in comparison to typical paradigms for other numerals and quantifiers. And then, is it necessary to do this for a dozen languages? CapnPrep 12:26, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

 * Since this is a section on the dual in the Slavic languages, I think that the dual forms in each of the Slavic languages should be mentioned. However, it may be more appropriate to place this section as its own article, where a complete listing can be given. The forms in this section would then be shorten to a respresentative sample (say Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Sorbic) with a comparison between the singlular, plural, and dual endings. Woollymammoth 02:26, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Remnants of dual in Czech
In Czech, although there is no dual as such, the plural forms of some nouns indicating things which naturally come in pairs (mainly paired organs e.g. eyes / ears) have a different declension from "normal" plurals - these even affects the adjectives which describe them (interesting that it is apparently the other way round in Slovene).

As pointed out in the previous contribution, this should not be confused with the use of the genitive singular for numbers of 5 or more, which is common to most (all?) Slavic languages. This is due to the way numbers 1-4 behave like adjectives, whereas other expressions of quantity behave like nonus.

Dual and Genitive
To clarify: Slavic languages use the genitive ("of" form) of nouns in connection with most expressions of quantity EXCEPT the numbers 1-4. Thus the expression for "five beers" literally translates as "a five of beers". The use of the dual in Slovene, or remnants of this form in other languages, is a separate issue.

Taking beer as the example, the Czech is: 1 pivo (singular), 2 piva (plural), 3 piva (plural), 4 piva (plural), 5 piv (genitive plural). In Slovene, I believe it would be 1 pivo (singular), 2 pivi (dual), 3 piva (plural), 4 piva (plural), 5 piv (genitive plural).

I apologise if I've got the Slovene examples wrong, but the principle still applies.

 * You got the Slovene examples right. While in Slovene "five beer" would only roughly (hardly) translate as "a five of beers" it is still true that for 5-and-above the genetive plural form is used. I think this explanation with genetive plural form removes all concerns about implication of more than three (singular, dual, plural) numbers. I might be talking about 10 bears or general plural of bears and I would still say "Medvedje so v kleti." (Bears are in the basement!) and still Five bears in the basement. would be Pet medvedov je v kleti.. Beers might not be such good example, because we would much rather like to talk about beer as a mass of liquid (Pivo je v kleti - Beer is in the basement). 222.152.244.105 13:31, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Pair
English utterly lacks a dual, but the semantic issues involved with pairs is interesting. Fashionistas insist on calling it a pant or jean, but they are pants and jeans. In fact, all garments that begin about the waist and extend somewhat around the thighs take the plural: pants, trousers, jeans, boxers, shorts, pantalettes, coulottes, etc.

Compare this to bikini, brief, panty hose (hose is an interesting word). If the garment does not enclose the thigh, it's singular. But notice that whitie-tighties (even though a white cotton male brief) is apparently plural.

The article mentions modern Hebrew. Stereo speakers are spoken of in the dual, along with headlights and eyeglasses. These are natural pairs, as with shoes and gloves. There is the issue of chirality (a bad article). --MarkTwainOnIce 06:55, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

 * English still retains some use of the dual, and even the trial number, in the use of occasion: e.g. once, twice, thrice, four times, five times etc, Lobbuss 10:46, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

 * Is it really a dual and trial? I guess they are just numerals, aren't they? Adam J. Sporka 10:23, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

 * Yes, the dual number is not the same thing as the number two, is it?
 * I guess it depends on how one defines "grammatical number". Is it just a matter of which quantity you're talking about, or is it a systematic inflection? Traditionally, the term "dual" has been used only in highly synthetic languages that have inflections associated with each number, where hundreds to thousands of words inflect in similar ways to show number. I don't suppose that English does this... FilipeS 12:20, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Splitting off the Dual in the Slavic Languages as a separate article
As has been mentioned by others above, I would propose that the section "Dual in the Slavic Languages" be split off as a separate article. A short summary of the Slavic dual should be presented, along with a section on both Slovenian and Sorbic, which have maintained the dual. It would be nice to include the forms for the verbs as well. Woollymammoth 02:29, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Latin
I remember from high school Latin that the pre-Golden Age (pre-Virgil) Latin had a dual. I'll look it up, and then work up a section. Has anyone else heard this? samwaltz 22:14, 22 May 2007 (UTC) I'm looking for more. Two lines saying that the dual died out in Latin... well, it's just not enough for my taste. samwaltz 22:35, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Some languages have a "dual" category, of which Latin has only vestiges, e.g. ambo, duo, where the long -o- is an Indo-European dual.
 * The form in -o is a remnant of the dual number, which was lost in Latin,

The Latin twenty is spelled diviginti in the article, though it's most often spelled viginti. I'm unsure of the dual grammatical form diviginti is attempting explain. I wonder if this is a conflation of duo de viginti (2 from 20 or eighteen), and the point made juxtaposed with triginta. The link supports my question or guess explaining the possible confusion. User:tgm8 —Preceding undated comment added 22:22, 21 October 2010 (UTC).
 * Wiktionary has excellent explanation User:tgm8
 * The word diviginti seemed to be just a mistake. I have changed it to viginti. Burzuchius (talk) 15:57, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Hebrew transcriptions
The Hebrew words are transcribed using Ashkenazic pronunciation, even when the text refers to the language "as spoken in the State of Israel". --Smack (talk) 18:50, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

English: inappropriate example
English has words distinguishing dual vs. plural number, including: both/all, between/among, latter/last, either/any, and neither/none. Japanese, which has no grammatical number, also has words dochira (which of the two) and dore (which of the three or more), etc. CapnPrep spent a long time over at the grammatical gender article getting it through my thick skull that the instances of gender inflection in English are so insignificant that they're not enough to say that English has grammatical genders. I quite agree. But exactly the same is true of so-called "duals" in English. In short: English doesn't really have dual number. FilipeS 14:30, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

 * If we mention Swedish begge, we have to mention English both for the same reason: it's a dual-like construction. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 14:39, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

 * Then we can mention Croatian oba/obje and tons of such expressions that can be found for almost any language. This has little to do with the actual grammatical dual. Admiral Norton (talk) 17:21, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

 * If the "both/all" distinction is verifiably common even in languages without dual, reporting on this distinction in the general case might be worth it. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 02:15, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I suppose this would fall under the same category, twice vs. times? What about thrice? 86.61.97.254 (talk) 20:05, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Japanese: dochira is not dual
As far as I understand, dochira is not necessarily "which of the two", it's just "which way". The set of possible answers has three options: Kochira (this way, near me), sochira (that way, near you), achira (that way, over there). Jpatokal (talk) 06:52, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

 * Hmm. After putting on my thinking hat and checking WWWJDIC's examples, I'll amend that: dochira can mean "which of two", but it does not necessarily mean that there are only two options:

 * どちらに御泊りですか.  [T]
 * Where are you staying? (= infinite options)
 * 紅茶とコーヒーではどちらの方が好きですか.  [T]
 * Which do you like better, tea or coffee? (= precisely two options)

 * But you couldn't say "tea or coffee or juice" using dochira in the second sentence. Jpatokal (talk) 06:58, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

The Japanese example is misleading. "Dochira" is part of the ko/so/a/do set with "kochira" and "sochira" and "achira", which are all terms relating to *direction*. That being "this way" (towards speaker) / "that way" (away from speaker) / "the previously mentioned way" (a definite/indefinite distinction) / "which way" respectively. I've heard NS use "dochi" for more than two ("dochi" just being a contraction) and "dore" for two, as well.

 * I'm very suspicious of this. As far as I know, Japanese has little noun inflection. It doesn't even have grammatical number as a morphological category, so how can it have a dual? FilipeS (talk) 12:09, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Bulgarian
This has been recently added to the article:
 * Bulgarian The loss of the dual led to the creation of the numerical plural form (broyna mnozhestvena forma) in the masculine, which follows all numbers, as well as several words like kolko (how many) and nyakolko (several)
 * stol (chair) → mnogo stolove (many chairs) → dva stola (two chairs)

I must admit I'm having trouble making out what this is supposed to mean. Could somebody more knowledgable work on it and make it more understandble? TomorrowTime (talk) 08:03, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
 * It's the distinction, found in many Slavic languages, that numbers 'two', 'three', and 'four' use nominative plural while numbers five and greater use genitive plural. In Czech: jeden stůl (one table) - dva stoly (two tables) - pět stolů (five tables, literally: a five of tables). Indefinite numbers - 'mnoho' (many), 'několik' (several), 'kolik' (how many), 'tolik' (so many), and the like - also use genitive plural. - Mike Rosoft (talk) 20:10, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

The dual in the Slavic languages
The table should be changed to have a single column for each case, since there is no genitive-locative parallel in some languages, like Croatian. Admiral Norton (talk) 20:42, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

 * And the Czech row is wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.179.235.249 (talk) 23:24, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Probably the last official use of dual number in a living Indo-European language
http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaizdas:2_LT_1925_A.png

The picture shows a 1925 Lithuanian 2 Litas coin with the inscription in dual.

The modern version has the inscription already in plural: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/2_litai_coin_%281997%29.jpg

If you find this interesting and appropriate, please insert the pictures into the article and edit the text as seems fit. I'm new to Wikipedia editing, sorry. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.59.224.136 (talk) 20:30, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry to disappoint you, but the dual is alive and kicking in Slovene, a major living Indo-European language. In fact, here's a picture of a 1993 Slovenian 2 tolar coin with the dual: (compare with the singular 1 tolar  and the plural 5 tolars . TomorrowTime (talk) 23:53, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Slovene
The part on Slovene dual gives too much weight on one study and is generally a confused mass of different things: language development from Old Church Slavic to Slovenian, situation in Standard Literary Slovenian, and situations in spokene Slovene and dialects.

Section should be cleared up by most importantly describing first Standard Literary Slovenian, which employes complete dual system (which by the way doesn't mean "same as in Old Church Slavic", but "fully within the bounds of the grammar, i.e. with nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc...). Then can be mentioned separately dialects and dialectal studies, spoken Slovene, etc, and processes there can be described. Statments about the development of dual should be removed and placed in another section higher in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.201.212.157 (talk) 14:09, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Those who understand the Slovene conjugations of the verbs in Singular, Dual and Plural can understand the conjugations in Rig Vedic sanskrit. This is the reason why there was no "1 common Slavic language (often transliterated through later artifical Church (post "pagan") Slavic language) for example, the verb "to be". Here I want to show you why the Slovene (through the dialects and written down as modern literal language) preserved antique Rig Vedic conjugations in Dual.

Sanskrit:

Singular: asmi, asi, asti. Dual: svah, sthah, stah. Plural: smah, stha, santi.

Slovene:

Singular: sem, si, je(probably transmuted from osti - jest; "he is") Dual: sva, sta, sta Plural: smo, ste, so. (in german remained as sind; from santi).

Another example of the verb to float / to swim:

Sanskrit:

Singular: plavami, plavaši, plavati. Dual: plavamah,, plavathah, plavatah. Plural: plavamah, plavatah, plavanti.

Slovene:

Singular: plavam, plavaš, plava. Dual: plavava, plavata, plavata. Plural: plavamo, plavate, plavajo.

Dual in Irish
Hi,

I'm not a linguist so I'm not sure the following information counts as "fully functioning as a paradigmatic category". In Munster Irish feminine nouns have a dual form. The nominative dual is the same in form as the dative singular and the genitive dual is the same in form as the genitive plural. The adjective qualifying the noun uses the plural form, there is no dual form for adjectives. I don't know of a reference in English, but in Irish: Diarmuid Ó Sé "Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne", p.223. AnSpideogDhubh (talk) 22:06, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
 * This is not only the case in Munster, though in the other dialects (and the Caighdeán), only a limited number of nouns (all parts of the body) have separate dual forms: dhá láimh, dhá chois, dhá chluais (as opposed to the singulars lámh, cos, cluas). Kokoshneta (talk) 15:38, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Choice of the word for "wolf" as an example
I feel it was a bad idea to choose the word for "wolf" as an example in the various Slavic languages, because it raises other, irrelevant issues in what is already a complicated matter. First, the Polish word "wilk" turns out have a second, irregular plural form "wilcy", which is in any case marked as "rare" - so it could surely have been omitted here, since it has nothing to do with the dual, which is after all the subject of this article. Second, the Slovene word "volk" is one of only a small number of masculine nouns that form their plural and dual with the infixed syllable '-ov-' - most masculine nouns simply add '-i' for the plural and '-a' for the dual, but 'volk' just happens to become 'volkovi' and 'volkova' rather than 'volki' and 'volka', another irrelevant issue that can only confuse the struggling learner. Not knowing all the languages involved as well as I do Russian and Slovene, I can't think off-hand of a better example that would not raise similarly irrelevant issues somewhere, and of course you need to find a word that's almost the same in all of them. But I'm sure a competent Slavicist could find something suitable.188.230.248.85 (talk) 13:56, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

The Hebrew dual is obscure for lack of vowel pointing
Article says: "An example of the dual form is יום / יומים / ימים yōm / yomạyim / yāmīm "day / two days / [two or more] days". Some words occur so often in pairs that the form with the dual suffix -ạyim . . . ."

 * The first sentence above is very obtuse. Can someone clarify it? Was it not technically possible to write those Hebrew words with vowel pointing? It looks like the writer is saying that the dual form uses a holem vav instead of mere holem; which surely is not his meaning. I am thinking it should be stated that the dual morpheme is now an assumption which was not written originally. We are assuming that there was a dual pronounced differently from the plural, marked by the centuries later vowel pointing system, none of which was in the original. I am thinking that to make this statement clear, a pathach has to be inserted to show the dual, as with יוֹמַ֫יִם

(PeacePeace (talk) 04:19, 12 January 2019 (UTC))

title: Talk:Dual (grammatical number)


text:
Talk:Torr

temperature and pressure
199.168.7.243 20:42, 13 August 2007 (UTC)The artilce introduces the Torr using this text: It is the atmospheric pressure that supports a column of mercury 1 millimeter high. This wording is ambiguous as atmospheric pressure is ~760 torr, or ~760mmHg. One Torr is the pressure that supports a column of mercury 1 millimeter high. It is most often used to measure gas pressures including atmospheric pressures.

199.168.7.243 20:42, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Presumably this is 1 mmHg at standard temperature and pressure?

Numeric Notation
Can we stick to either Engineering Notation or normalized Scientific Notation (or even plain decimal)? For example in the conversion table, in the atm column, it has 1.0197×10−5 in one row and 70.307×10−3 in another. It seems like consistently using normalized Scientific Notation (i.e., changing the latter to 7.0307×10−2) would make it a lot easier to get a quick sense of the different magnitudes.Erikmartin (talk) 18:28, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Band?
I eliminated this:

'''The Torr' is also the name given to a Bristol based rock band which formed in 1998 and are still performing and recording today. Noteable members include: Jon Steadman, Neil Berry & James Trotham.''

If it is found useful, it should be put in a stub page or in a disambiguation page. SaintCahier 17:00, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

More importantly, 1mmHG at Earth's gravity
Is there an official torr now defined in terms of another measurement system, or do you measure your own?

 * This is close to 1 mmHg at 0 °C and standard gravity. That is the temperature that was most often used for metric units based on a column of mercury; for inches of mercury, in earlier times 60 °F was more common but the ones still in use today are most often exactly equal to 24.4 mmHg, so are also essentially equivalent to the 32 °F (0 °C) variety, though mercury is no longer actually used in the precise definitions.

 * It's just that defining a standard atmosphere as both 101.325 kPa and 760 mmHg makes a more precise definition of these units based on the units for which standards are currently maintained, namely the SI units. That 101.325 kPa number was chosen because it was, to the nearest pascal, the calculated pressure of 760 mm mercury at a certain conventional density under those conditions.  Gene Nygaard 22:22, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

At no stage have we heard which authority originally defined the Torr, nor which international authority currently owns / maintains the definition. The arguments between AMA vs NIST are parochial for the international readership, unless one of these turns out to be the internationally-recognised authority for the definition. While millimetre of mercury may be a non-SI unit, the 'millimeter' spelling is sanctioned by the US Government. The SI English spelling is millimetre. Ian Cairns 22:49, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

 * 1) Where did you get the silly notion that some one body must "own" each unit of measure?
 * 2) There is no rule that any international body must act.
 * 3) There is no international body with plenary authority in this area.
 * 4) There can be and are disagreements among various international standards setting agencies, just as there are differences between the AMA Style Guide and the NIST Style Guide concerning the symbol for millimeters of mercury.
 * 5) There is no "SI English spelling." The BIPM chooses to follow use one spelling in their work; they do not state it as a general rule.  Do you understand the difference?  That's a "house rule", not a prescription.
 * — Gene Nygaard 23:41, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

 * Most relevant to this discussion is that we at Wikipedia have our own "house rules"— and one of them is that you do not arbitrarily mess with an article's consistent use of a particular spelling of litre/liter, color/colour, tyre/tire, and the like. Gene Nygaard 23:50, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

 * Another point: There are lots of Canadian Tire stores, and not one Canadian Tyre store.  We also spell this word tire in the United States, so this is an international English spelling.  Yet there are Wikipedia articles which spell this word tyre. International does not mean prescriptive for the whole English-speaking world. Gene Nygaard 00:55, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Nonexistent distinction
I reverted this addition by User:Urhixidur:
 * Strictly speaking, the millimetre of mercury and the torr are slighly different units. Using the conventional density of mercury  of 13595.1 kg/m3 and the conventional acceleration of gravity, 760 mmHg equals a pressure of exactly 101,325.0144354 Pa, which was rounded down in 1954 by the 10th CGPM to give the conventional value of the atmosphere (101,325 Pa).  The torr, defined as 1/760 of the latter value, is thus slightly smaller than the mmHg (by about 0.14 ppm), although both are used interchangeably in practice.

These are merely successive definitons of the same unit. Nobody redefining this unit has ever intended for there to coexist two slightly different variations of the unit. A particular name may be deprecated, but I'm not sure that that is the case either. Gene Nygaard 15:30, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

 * I wish Gene were right, but he isn't. As this source and this other source show, the mmHg used to be defined (by the World Meteorological Organization, according to this) as I described in the excerpt above.  We're agreed that there was never an intent to have the torr actually different from the mmHg, but in practice they were (and still are) because the definitions disagreed.  This point is worth making, if only for the historical insight into metrology it provides.
 * Urhixidur 2005 June 28 12:48 (UTC)

 * Your first source does not say when WMO defined the mmHg this way, and is not an indication that this is not just a successive definitions problem. Whether or not the WMO has ever formally adopted an updated version is irrelevant to the question, especially when the difference is about four decimal orders of magnitude removed from making a difference in any of these measurements as made in anything in the province of the WMO.  And especially since the WMO never uses them any more, except perhaps dealings with the U.S. NWS which uses them yet in public and aviation weather reports, though not in the more "scientific" contexts.   Your second source may be an indication of some remaining unresolved inconsistency in British Standards (and once again, likely mostly irrelevant for the purposes for which those definitions are used), still not anything to disprove a successive refinement of the definition of a unit of measure quite legitimately and properly known by both names under both definitions (even if very specific legalistic applications might require one form or the other in some particular context).

 * The thing is, as even your arguments point out so well, nobody has plenary authority in this regard. And nobody is required to make these definitions, or to update them immmediately even if a de facto standard becomes established which varies slightly from them.  There is nothing improper about one group of users deciding to use the name "millimetre of mercury" and with another group using the name "torr" to refer to the unit defined by saying that a standard atmosphere is equal to both 760 of that unit and to 101.325 kPa, and there is nothing improper about one group of users deciding to use "millimetre of mercury" and with another group using "torr" to refer to the unit defined by saying that this refers to the pressure exerted by mercury at a certain temperature and at a certain acceleration of gravity, and there is nothing improper about one group of users deciding to use "millimetre of mercury" and with another group using "torr" to refer to the unit defined by making that definition less ambiguous by specifying a specific density and a specific acceleration of free fall.

But what we do know or at least can determine is the historical progression of those definitions: The middle of those three first, then the last one, then the first one. There is nothing improper with various groups of people choosing to use "millimeter of mercury" and "torr" as exact synonyms under any of these definitions. Gene Nygaard 28 June 2005 15:03 (UTC)

 * Not to reopen the debate on differences in the size or derivation of one mmHg vs one Torr, but this page suggests that Torr are an absolute value, starting with zero Torr at a perfect vacuum, while mmHg indicate a gauge pressure. Admittedly, this is from a manufacturer, not a scientific body, but it still seems worth discussing here, if not on the actual page.  Anyone?  --Badger151 03:58, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Conversion tables
The following table of conversion factors appears in many Wikipedia articles:

The table was removed from the present article because it flatly contradicts the article itself. The table says that 1 Torr = 1 mmHg. One of the main points of the article is that 1 Torr is not equal to1 mmHg. While it is true that 1 Torr almost equals 1 mmHg, the two units are not identical.

Among the many articles in Wikipedia that deal with pressure, some contain copies of this table while others do not. An example of the former is Pressure. An example of the latter is Conversion of units. Since the table is, at best, misleading (and frankly wrong from a technical viewpoint), I think it should be entirely removed from Wikipedia (not just from the present article). Also, as a matter of principle, “millimeter of mercury” and “mmHg” should not be redirected to Torr.

 * The table you pasted here says that 1 torr ≈ 1 mm Hg; that's "approximately equal". Maybe your browser doesn't support unicode properly? --Slashme 09:16, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

 * It should be "equals". See the section above this.  Just like feet or meters or whatever, these units have had various definitions over time.  That's all that is involved here.  -- Gene Nygaard (talk) 17:16, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Conversion of SI pressure units
The SI unit of pressure is the pascal (Pa). Other units in common use are derived from SI units according to the following four definitions (see article for references):
 * The atmosphere (symbol: atm) is defined as exactly 101,325 Pa.
 * The bar (symbol: bar) is defined as exactly 100,000 Pa.
 * The torr (symbol: Torr) is defined as exactly 1/760 atm.
 * The millimeter of mercury (symbol: mmHg) is defined as the product of (1) the “standard’ density of mercury at 0 °C (13.5951 g/cm3) and (2) the “standard” acceleration of gravity gn (9.80665 m/s2).

From these four definitions, the entire conversion table can be constructed. In the tables shown below, I omit conversions involving the pound-force per square inch (a non-SI unit) and the technical atmosphere (an obsolete unit involving the avoirdupois kilogram-force). There is nothing wrong with having these units in a conversion table; they are omitted here only because we are discussing SI units.

The first table shows exact conversion factors. This format emphasizes the underlying simplicity of the SI, and shows clearly why the conversion factors for Torr and mmHg are different:

The second table gives approximate conversion factors (to six significant figures). This is the format that is used in practice. The torr and the millimeter of mercury are so similar that their differences do not appear at six significant figures. Note the pairs of identical values scattered throughout the table:

The differences become apparent when additional significant figures are included:

1 Pa = 0.0075006168271 Torr                          1 bar = 750.06168271 Torr = 0.0075006157585 mmHg                                = 750.06157585 mmHg

1 atm = 760.00000000 Torr                            1 Torr = 0.99999985753 mmHg = 759.99989173 mmHg                            1 mmHg = 1.00000014247 Torr

1 Torr = 0.00133322368421 bar                        1 Torr = 133.322368421 Pa          1 mmHg = 0.00133322387415 bar (exactly )              1 mmHg = 133.322387415 Pa (exactly)

With two exceptions (noted above) these decimal conversion factors are infinitely long. The two exceptions are exact conversion factors in decimal form. Of course, all of the fractions in the first table are exact conversion factors.

Clearly, these distinctions are so small as to be negligible for most purposes. However, scientific articles in Wikipedia should not tolerate ambiguities, especially when thy are misleading. Btarski 23:12, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

The cgs system
The statement that the torr “was used in the cgs system of units” is incorrect. The cgs unit of pressure was the dyne per square centimeter. It was called the barye, equal to 0.1 Pa.

The torr was used in conjunction with both the cgs and the mks systems. It was usually taken to mean “millimeter of mercury,” but it was also used to mean 1/760 of a standard atmosphere. As discussed in the article, these two definitions are incompatible.

When the standard atmosphere was defined as exactly 101325 Pa the torr was defined to make 1 atm = 760 torr. The millimeter of mercury was never a part of the cgs, mks or SI systems. The cgs system is now obsolete. Any discussion of the torr in relation to the cgs system is of historical interest only.

Unlike the mmHg, the torr (with its modern definition of 1/760 1 atm = 101325/760 Pa) is a perfectly legitimate unit of pressure, derived from SI units. Its use in general is discouraged, since the SI unit of pressure is the pascal.

Various Wikipedia articles continue to confuse the matter by offering different interpretations of both the torr and the mmHg. The articles on pressure, bar (unit) and pascal (unit) all contain the incorrect conversion table discussed above (under “Conversion tables”). This table (which treats the torr and the mmHg as identical) was correct until 1954. It has been obsolete ever since then.

to get

So I did. But it happened to show on my screen with a linebreak between the number and the unit,
 * pascals (~133.3 Pa)
 * pascals (~133.3 Pa)

So I wrapped it in nowrap:

to get
 * $101,325/760$ pascals (~133.3 Pa)

which is accurate, conformant to MOS:FRAC and MOS:MATH, and not misreadable.

To discuss this, please me. --Thnidu (talk) 10:30, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

google
Some parts of this article come up in a Google search, but the fractions don't come through as fractions. This might take some discussion with actual Google people to fix. Gah4 (talk) 21:06, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

manometric units are routinely used
It seems to me that manometric units are routinely used when one needs about 2 digits of precision, such that the differences in g and density of Hg don't matter. I was just noticing that natural gas pressures, as input to a furnace, are inches of water. In this case, it would be gauge pressure, as that is what affects a burner. Blood pressure is also about 2 digits. While much of the article makes a big difference comparing torr and mmHg, most often is isn't significant. In the case of high vacuum systems, one digit is about right. Gah4 (talk) 21:27, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

 * I'm sure that precision has a lot to do with it, if I'm understanding you correctly. By the time Kelvin and Edison we're doing their famous experiments in deep vacuum, they were routinely pulling vacuums that were a full order of magnitude or more deeper than are found in space (10-5 torr). You need very precise gauges to measure that. In natural gas lines, you don't need high precision. Pressure in the building I'm in right now is measured in PSI, which is between is 2 for low pressure and 5 for high pressure lines. A little more precision is needed at the individual heating units, so each has it's own regulator and are fine tuned in either inches of water or millimeters of mercury (mainly, I suppose as a matter of convenience, because that's also how you measure the various dynamic pressures in the incoming combustion-air).

 * In lighting, high precision is necessary, because it's one of those things where the slightest difference in the beginning can make vast differences in performance down the line. (See: Chaos theory) One of the biggest problems Edison had, for example, was getting all the oxygen and water vapor out of his lamps. In neon lamps and flashtubes, you can just bombard the glass with high-energy particles and break loose all the water and oxygen, but with other forms of lighting they had to heat it to red-hot temperatures externally and pull very high vacuums to get all the impurities out. That required some very precise gauges to make the process repeatable and reliable. Zaereth (talk) 00:13, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
 * This is probably right. It might be good to have a source for its ongoing routine use?
 * At the moment, the NPL citation given for manometric measurements being discouraged does not have anything to that effect. I also question the use of the generalised passive voice here - discouraged by whom, for what purposes? 51.155.19.253 (talk) 13:52, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Inches of mercury
Should the article mention inches of mercury, way too often used in the US? I suspect both absolute and gauge pressure are used, and not always consistently. Gah4 (talk) 10:54, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Torr


text:
Talk:Dawson's Creek

Full Episodes Online
Canadian broadcaster Global TV has launched an online initiative called TV Classics, featuring full episodes of Dawson's Creek. While content is available to Canadian audiences only, I thought it valuable to add links to the External Links section with the appropriate disclaimers (Canada only). Is this deemed too commercial?

The destination URL is TV Classics. Web-enthusiast (talk) 17:50, 29 June 2009 (UTC)Web-enthusiast

DVD
It's stated on the page that there is controversy over the DVDs being released as 4 discs sets instead of 6, yet the pictures for Seasons 3+ claim 6 discs on the box art. I have season 2 and there are only 4 discs. Were there two versions released? Her024 06:54, 16 May 2007 (UTC) her024

Page Redirect
Maybe someone should remove the link for Jack McPhee on this page as it redirects directly back here again. Thanks

Or maybe we should just give Jack his own page, poor guy. Her024 06:54, 16 May 2007 (UTC)her024

Rewrite Please
"The script's tendancy to give its supposedly teenage characters dialogue whose intellectual content resembling[?] cultural studies postgraduates[?] (in other words long sentences laden with references to books, old movies, and such, not to mention a total absence of contemporary slang) has been widely commented on, though as the characters age this incongruity is less noticable."

This period ought to be re-written in a clearer and less ungrammatical form.

S.

Episode List Necessary?
I completely replaced the article that was here--thus the first comment is no longer relevant--but did not include a list of the 128 episodes of the series as has been done with some programs, e.g. Gilmore Girls, Party of Five, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't think it was necessary as I link to several sites that list them--TV Tome's is very nice, complete with episode summaries, guest stars, etc.--plus I didn't want to type them all in. Does anyone think we need to post an episode list here on Wikipedia when we'd simply be reinventing the wheel? Please let me know on my talk page. Ave! PedanticallySpeaking 19:16, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)

High-flying verbiage
An unregistered user altered a sentence in the "glowing reviews" section regarding the diction from Williams to Holmes. I've put it back because in my commonplace books I have noted an article where Williams says this. (If anyone wants the cite, I'll dig it out. I don't have my books with me at present, otherwise I'd cite it now.)  PedanticallySpeaking 13:46, Oct 2, 2004 (UTC)

High-Flying, Part Two
In Jeffrey Zaslow's "Straight Talk" in USA Weekend (July 10, 1998, page 22), he quotes Michelle Williams as saying that she had to look up dialogue in the scripts in her dictionary. If the unregistered user who changed it to Katie Holmes can show me a source where Holmes said the same thing, then we can say Holmes and Williams--but until then, I'm reverting it to just Williams. PedanticallySpeaking 17:58, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

Not as Good as it Used to Be
I cut this graf from the article in the interests of neutrality, but wanted to preserve it all the same.

Like those of The New Yorker, Dawson's Creek's critics from the very beginning complained it was not as good as it used to be--Williamson's departure at the end of the second season to create another show for ABC was blamed. Predictions of its swift demise were legion and not unjustified. The story arcs were not mapped out thoroughly and characters were introduced and dismissed with a breathtaking arbitrariness--Emma and Eve, for example. And quite a few of the couples were forced together by the writers, the absence of chemistry or sparks notwithstanding. Despite these palpable flaws, the show was addictive all the same, a true guilty pleasure.

Twins
An unregistered user changed the reference to Andie and Jack being twins. They were so. Do a Google search here for several citations. PedanticallySpeaking 17:12, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, Andie and Jack are not twins. In the newsletter section of the official Dawson's Creek website, a member of the writing team addressed the issue as follows:

 * "Jack and Andie are not twins. Jack is age 17 and Andie is age 16. However, they are in the same grade because they started school at the same time -- both are now juniors in high school. This was stated at the beginning of season three. Jack therefore is officially older."

 * "The Jack and Andie question is always asked but never solved. Here's the deal: when the writers first created Jack they wanted him to be a year older or younger than Andie, they were leaning towards older but they weren't positive which way they wanted to go. But then Paul Stupin was doing an interview so he asked, "Is Jack older or younger?" and the writers said "older." But then we realized we liked Jack and we decided that even though he was a little older than Andie, they would be in the same grade. So the answer is: JACK AND ANDIE ARE IN THE SAME GRADE, BUT JACK IS OLDER THAN ANDIE! (Of course, it's our ongoing joke in the writer's room -- look in upcoming episode #404 for a joke regarding this very subject!)" (newsletter issue 97)

Rlw31 May 23, 2005 In one eposide, andie was talking about her and Jack's birthday being that day; which sounds like twins — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.181.34.197 (talk) 04:18, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Jack
"in the season finale, after Jen had lived with the Leerys and the McPhees, she welcomed Jen back--as well as a now homeless and homosexual Jack."

Something about this placement seems POV to me. While I agree that Jack being gay is germane to the show, and should certainly be mentioned in the article, the placement of his orientation in this particular entry seems POV to me.

I removed the text "as well as a now homeless, yet still homosexual, Jack." from this position before because it was POV. "Yet" suggests that Jack wouldn't have been homeless if he weren't gay, and "still" suggests his sexuality could be altered, although no reputable scientific or medical organization supports the notion that sexual orientation can be changed.

Perhaps it is this earlier addition, by the same user, that is coloring my perception. Do others have opinions on this? --Essjay 10:00, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

 * As I've written nearly all of this article, I was almost ready to accept responsibilty for the phrase in question, but as it seemed a bit off, I went through the edit history and discovered this clause is a recent addition, made by User:216.201.117.202, who has two edits in total, both of them to this article. I do concur with Essjay's deletion on the grounds that, one, the clause is awkward, and, two, Jack being homosexual has been mentioned previously, so it is redundant here. Something could be said about Mrs. Ryan accepting him into her home considering the show's attitude toward her religious beliefes in the first season, but this is not the way to do it.  PedanticallySpeaking 16:19, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

On the main page
This article is to be the featured article of the day on May 30, 2005. PedanticallySpeaking 17:24, May 25, 2005 (UTC)
 * Wow. Just wow. --Madchester 04:10, 2005 May 30 (UTC)
 * It's official. This is Hell. Roge Ebert 01:39, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Mistake on front page
The end of the featured article text stops with a quotation mark. But where did it begin?

lots of issues | leave me a message 10:00, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * The person who summarised the article for the Main Page "Featured article" section mislaid an important citation.
 * "'It was the first series bold enough to pick up the mantle of Beverly Hills 90210 and an inspiration for many variations on the teenage angst theme, including The O.C. on Fox.'"
 * This line, correctly cited by the article itself, appears unattributed on today's Main Page. It originally appeared in the New York Times on Sept 10, 2004: (You'll need an NYT subscription to see the article.) That's pretty bad, not to mention embarrassing. --151.205.100.241 16:35, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * That is awfully sloopy. lots of issues  | leave me a message 02:08, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

scripts
"punchy dialogue"; "witty"? How are the strings of smarmy self-satisfied quips and painfully melodramatic monologues that make up Dawson's Creek scripts in any way punchy or clever? I agree that the standards of 'POV' shouldn't be quite as high when arts or drama are being discussed (otherwise it's difficult to describe the thing in question) - but stupid POVs are too much.

--163.1.167.63 11:15, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Poor introductory sentence
"..aimed at and mostly about teenagers..." doesn't read very well. I would remove and mostly about. The comma is also unnecessary. I wouldn't want to 'spoil' the article on its big day, so I shan't edit it yet. Comments? reetep 23:04, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
 * The lead is largely others handiwork. But you're right, it is awkward.  PedanticallySpeaking 18:06, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

Any Mention of J.Crew? --> American Eagle
This show was originally a branding stunt for the mail order catalogue J. Crew according to Naomi Klein's No Logo. Is there any plan of mentioning this? This could be another cause of: "The show generated an unusual amount of publicity before its debut...", rather than the supposed racy plots! Muxxa 23:53, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Anent the recent removal of a paragraph about American Eagle product placement: the inclusion of the text was a copyvio but the point seems to be legitimate. Can someone fill in the facts? 16:40, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The following was snuck in by Luigi.bozzo, but I feel it was inappropriate and misplaced (see oldedit:

"Dawson's Creek is a teen-age soap opera closely aligned with the collegiate image. Dawson and his friends live their lives like a serialized clothing advertisement, inhabiting a world in which the characters are contractually obligated to wear American Eagle. So it is no surprise that the teen-agers who enjoy the clothing also enjoy the program. Or, as Marjorie Jaffe – a spokeswoman for American Eagle – said when explaining her company's product-placement deal with the show, "our customer is their viewer.""

The immersive marketing angle needs a better treatment. For someone not into Dawson's creek, this is the most interesting thing about the show, and it is a shame that wikipedia has no mention of this. Muxxa 05:48, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

My own opinion is that the following paragraph should be deleted:
 * "The show generated an unusual amount of publicity before its debut, with several television critics and watchdog groups expressing concerns about its anticipated "racy" plots and dialog; the controversy even drove one of the original production companies away from the project."

This alleged controversy sounds like hype, who was nearly driven away? How about something along these lines:
 * "The show was originally conceived as a type of immersive advertising for the clothing line American Eagle. As an extension of product placement, all characters wore clothing by that manufacturer and lived out idealized lives." Muxxa 06:01, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

 * I wrote most of this article and in all my research, I never once saw American Eagle mentioned. As for the bit about Naomi Klein, the show isn't mentioned in the index to her No Logo.  I did see it with J. Crew--and the index's page cites were off on those references--and she says they cross-promoted one another.  They put their clothes on the show and it the show was featured in their catalog.  That sort of thing happens routinely in television.  Always has.  Look at Green Acres and you'll see Eva Gabor's designer's name mentioned.  Or Botany 500 used to dress men on 60's shows.  PedanticallySpeaking 14:51, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
 * Oh. The controversy before it aired?  Very true.  The Procter and Gamble company was one of the original producers but they sold their interest after several highly critical articles in their hometown papers The Cincinnati Enquirer and Cincinnati Post.  Those articles are cited in the bibliography.  PedanticallySpeaking 14:54, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
 * Thank you PedanticallySpeaking, point taken on the controversy issue. Yes, American Eagle was not mentioned in No Logo, but I understand that Naomi Klein was highlighting an important shift where content is generated by the marketing firm. I understand that the actors were originally employed as models for (a) clothing company. Can you refute this? Muxxa 03:42, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, all four of the teenage leads had acted before. Joshua Jackson was in two or three of the Mighty Ducks movies.  Michelle Williams was an actress in L.A. who'd been on Home Improvement and was the teenage version of the alien that became Natasha Henstridge in Species.  Katie Holmes was still in high school in Toledo when cast (they shot the original pilot during her spring break in 1997), but had one credit (The Ice Storm).  And James Vanderbeek had acted in a couple films.  I don't believe they were models before their success with Dawson's Creek--or if they did do modeling, they weren't know for it.  A majority of the adult regulars, Shipp, Humes, Peil, all were established actors.  John Wesley Shipp was daytime soap star who won an Emmy.  Mary-Margaret Humes was one of Mel Brooks's Vestal Virgins in History of the World.  And Mary Beth Peil played Anna Leonowens opposite Yul Brynner's King of Siam on Broadway.  PedanticallySpeaking 14:43, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

Two Junior Years
There were not two junior years as someone wrote. The first season began with the gang starting Capeside High in the tenth grade. The second season continued the sophomore year, picking up the morning after the first season finale. The third season was junior year and the fourth was senior year. PedanticallySpeaking 18:05, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
 * I rolled back a change today. The series began just before they began high school.  Their first year of high school was the tenth grade.  See the transcript of the first episode here where Joey says "we start high school Monday".  Later, Dawson tells Jen it's the tenth grade.  PedanticallySpeaking 13:40, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Way too long
Am I the only one who thinks this article is far too long? The episode list should definitely be on a seperate page, and maybe even the various season summeries. The credits list could either be done away with or moved. And the finale could stand to be its own article. 209.51.77.64 21:54, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

A great story
It's not the case in here if it is full of clever or lexical words. We have to analyze the photography, that's great, by the way, and the focus of the series. Who haven't passed by those dramas...may throw the first rock. And of course, there is still the great characters and very "good looking" actors and actressess. And by the way...it is classical. A cult series and anyone who could watch it with free-minded vision can see its value.
 * Uh-huh. - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) talk 03:36, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Katie Holmes
I've completely reworked the article on Katie Holmes and have posted it on WP:PR in the hopes of advancing it to WP:FAC. I would be grateful for your comments at Peer review/Katie Holmes/archive1. PedanticallySpeaking 19:02, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Dawson's headwaters
What's the source of the title? Xander Berkeley 01:44, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Dawsonscreekalbumcover1.jpg
Image:Dawsonscreekalbumcover1.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in Wikipedia articles constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.BetacommandBot 00:45, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Minor Character Page?
There a large number of minor characters who could usefully get a mention but wouldn't justify a whole page. Do people think it is worth creating one? Some of the minor characters who do now have pages could be merged into it.Dejvid 10:27, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Music Not Credited??
I have been searching to find who the artist was for a certain song Season 3, episode 21. I can't believe that there are no credits anywhere for any of the music that was played in any of the episodes?? Does anyone know where I can look?

character link removed
I removed the Evelyn Ryan link as the wikipedia entry is for a completely unrelated feature film http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Ryan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.99.61.139 (talk) 00:10, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Story summary?!
Why does this article not have a summary of the actual PLOT of DC? Can someone add this section? It needn't be more than 3 paragraphs for all 6 seasons.--Aquillyne-- (talk) 00:02, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

PLEASE SOMEONE ADD THIS --Aquillyne-- (talk) 16:04, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Episodes with film titles
The article says the following: What is the source for this last bit on legal action? Also, this would be better off in the main article. - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) talk 03:24, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * A large number of episode titles were also those of films, e.g. The Longest Day, Hotel New Hampshire, Secrets & Lies, Falling Down, The Lost Weekend, High Anxiety, and The Kids Are Alright. Many were allusions to William Shakespeare, e.g. the finale, All Good Things…Must Come to an End, Two Gentlemen of Capeside and "To Be or Not to Be...That Is The Question".  One title, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, was the title of a volume of film criticism by Pauline Kael. Due to the possibility of legal action, the names of individual episodes were changed after their initial airing to reflect a more generic theme. Hence, a lot of earlier episodes are known under two alternate titles.

Questionable material
The following is unsourced information:

While this is interesting, we can't use it unless you provide a source. Also, none of this is really trivia, as trivia by its definition is "unimportant information" - it therefore shouldn't be in a trivia section but instead the information should be incorporated into the main article. There is also some questionable material: While this wikilinks to the German Wikipedia versions of the article, these are not reasonable sources. We never reference ourselves, regardless of the language being pointed to. The above last two bits are not really NPOV, and seem a bit trivial. - Tbsdy lives (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) talk 03:30, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * There was an incredible spike in the popularity of the name "Dawson" after the show premiered. According to the Social Security Administration, the name was the 744th most popular boys name in 1997 but leapt to 198th in 1998 and 136th in 1999.  It has since dropped to 206th in 2004.
 * The necklace worn by Dawson throughout the first seasons was James Van Der Beek's. The wardrobe department centered his wardrobe around it.
 * Supposedly, episode 6-22 "Joey Potter and The Capeside Redemption" was going to be the season six finale, leading to a seventh season—however, the decision to end the series came up and the two-hour finale was made.
 * Actress Meredith Monroe (Andie McPhee) shot three scenes to be used in the series finale but they were not used because of time constraints. In the unbroadcasted footage, Andie was shown to be as a medical student and living in Boston. The uncut version complete with Meredith's scenes can be seen on DVD.
 * The Ice House restaurant burned at the end of the second season because the owners of the location used for filming did not wish to continue their association with the show—thus the building was written out of the program.
 * In the German version, the male lead characters: Dawson, Pacey and Jack were dubbed by the brothers Dennis, Gerrit and Florian Schmidt-Foß. Dennis, who dubbed Pacey, married Dascha Lehmann, the voice actress dubbing Joey Potter.
 * Chad Michael Murray, Hilarie Burton, and Lee Norris of The CW (then The WB) show One Tree Hill originally guest starred in Dawson's Creek. Not surprisingly, One Tree Hill is also filmed in North Carolina. John Driscoll who played Blossom on Dawson's Creek also guest starred in an episode of One Tree Hill. He played a guy at a bar that Brooke had hooked up with on a previous date.
 * Owing much of its early success to Dawson's Creek, The WB fittingly reaired the pilot episode at 9 pm EST on the network's final broadcast day, September 17, 2006, making it the last program to ever air on the network.

Title explanation?
I know this is a pretty stupid question, but what was the creative background behind the title? Elfred (talk) 23:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Not stupid at all, since there is a community in British Columbia named Dawson Creek. What's the connection?Toddsschneider (talk) 03:18, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Jen's daughter
Does anyone know who the father of Jen's daughter was? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.158.3.150 (talk) 09:19, 30 December 2009 (UTC)

 * No one knows but people imagine sometimes its CJ. 98.15.83.179 (talk) 16:47, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Could we be more vague?
"By the end of its run, the show, its crew, and its young cast had been nominated for numerous awards, winning four of them."

I don't know if this quite counts as weasel words, but it definitely counts as poor writing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.111.7.31 (talk) 09:52, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Bad Geography
Under the Production section, in Filming Locations it is stated that "Capeside is a fictional town [...]located on Cape Cod, possibly somewhere mid-Cape between Falmouth and Yarmouth [...] and is located between the cities of Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts." Neither Providence nor Boston are located on Cape Cod; one cannot be both on Cape Cod and between Providence and Boston. This is a physical impossibility. The only question is whether these (impossible) facts are mentioned in the show itself, or are the result of a geographical misunderstanding by the wiki page contributor. If the latter I suggest an edit. MusicPapa (talk) 15:52, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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Character pages deleted?
I noticed that a few of the character pages have been deleted, however, I was unable to find any discussions as to why they were deleted, it seemed they were just deleted without any discussion. Also, of the ones that were deleted, they were of more prominent characters (Jen, Pacey, Jack, Andie, etc.) while less notable characters' pages (Mitch, Gail, Bessie, etc.) are still there, but redirected. Perhaps we should either bring back the articles that were deleted and make them better, or create a Characters page with with briefer descriptions of each character, particularly of the minor characters. I liked the individual character pages that we had, and I do not like how they were deleted so suddenly. Perhaps bring them back, create a separate Characters page and have each one redirect to them, or bring them back how they were. Arilicious (talk) 19:05, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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logo
Why the infobox shows a simple black rectangle as the logo? It's strange because after clicking on it a correct image displays. Can someone fix into  ?

--37.30.20.249 (talk) 00:06, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Composer link incorrect
Link to composer Adam Fields sends you to the wrong Adam Fields’ page. There are two, one is a producer, which is where the links take you. Adam Fields the composer, who actually wrote the ending credits, does not have a Wikipedia page at this time. 2600:4040:7EF9:3B00:84A:5CBC:AF20:2A4B (talk) 02:52, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Dawson's Best Friend?
Both Pacey and Joey are listed as Dawson's best friend. Choose one! 31.94.62.68 (talk) 01:09, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
 * (In the case your are not trolling) A person can have more than one best friend. It is allowed. Novemberjazz 19:24, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Historic Kiss
I wanted to add a little paragraph talking a little bit about how Jack's kiss with Ethan was the first romantic kiss shared on screen between two men, during prime time. However, I'm not too sure about where that would fit. I thought about doing it under the reception/controversy section. Annajanostiac (talk) 02:07, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Dawson's Creek


text:
Upper Goyt Valley

The Upper Goyt Valley is the southern section of the valley of the River Goyt in North West England.

Position
The source of the Goyt River is on Axe Edge Moor above Goyt's Moss to the south. The western side of the valley is a long ridge, running from Shining Tor to Windgather Rocks, which forms the county boundary between Derbyshire and Cheshire; the boundary formerly followed the river itself. The eastern side of the valley rises to Burbage Edge, overlooking Buxton, and Combs Moss. The old stone Derbyshire Bridge gets its name from it being at the historic boundary from Cheshire into Derbyshire. The road south out of the Goyt Valley is one-way and crosses the bridge.

History
The Street Roman road runs alongside Errwood Reservoir and to the west of Fernilee Reservoir.

The disused Cromford and High Peak Railway line (which connected the High Peak canal at Whaley Bridge with the River Derwent in Cromford since 1831) runs along the east side of the reservoirs. This stretch of the railway line was closed in 1896.

The Fernilee gunpowder mill operated in the valley from about 1800 at the site of Fernilee Reservoir. It was acquired in 1888 by Chilworth Gunpowder Company and expanded before closing in 1920, after numerous fatal accidents. Errwood Hall was the Victorian mansion of the Grimshawe family, built in about 1840 but it is now in ruins. Below Foxlow Edge there is a Spanish shrine, built in 1889 in memory of Miss Dolores (a friend of the Grimshawe family). The shrine is a designated Grade II listed building.

A local legend tells that Pym Chair is the spot where a highway man called Pym robbed passers by on the packhorse route. However another story is that Pym was a preacher who gave sermons there.

Reservoirs
The valley floor is now dominated by two drinking-water reservoirs, fed by the River Goyt. Both reservoirs were built by the Stockport Corporation Waterworks (after they acquired the Grimshawe estate) to provide drinking water for Stockport town and the surrounding area. Fernilee Reservoir was completed in 1938 and the hamlet of Goyt's Bridge and Errwood Hall were destroyed to prevent any pollution of the water. Errwood Reservoir was completed in 1967. A spectacular suspension bridge once crossed the river but it was demolished to make way for Errwood Reservoir. An old packhorse bridge was saved and reconstructed near Goytsclough Quarry. The reservoirs and much of the surrounding land is currently owned by United Utilities.

Moorland
The open gritstone moorlands of the Upper Goyt Valley (Wild Moor, Goyt's Moss, Burbage Edge, Shining Tor to Cats Tor ridge and Hop Moor) are a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Heather is the main plant but the heathland is habitat for a variety of native grasses, rushes, sedges and shrubs including bilberry, crowberry, cowberry and cross-leaved heath. Hare’s-tail cottongrass and sphagnum moss are common along the Shining Tor ridge. The area is important for upland breeding birds including a large population of golden plover, as well as red grouse, curlew, lapwing, whinchat, snipe, twite, ring ouzel and merlin. Along Goyt’s Clough (by the River Goyt from Derbyshire Bridge down to Errwood Reservoir) there are common sandpiper and dipper and the old commoner woodland includes oak, birch, rowan and alder.

Tourism
The valley has been a popular tourist destination since the 19th century.

Errwood Sailing Club operates at Errwood Reservoir.

The Peak District Boundary Walk from Buxton follows the disused railway line into the Valley from the south east, crosses the Errwood Dam and then tracks along the west side of the Fernilee reservoir.

There are two large car parks in the central valley at The Street and Errwood Hall. There are smaller car parks at Derbyshire Bridge to the south and at the northern end of Fernilee Reservoir. There are extensive footpaths through the valley.

title: Upper Goyt Valley


text:
Sprachbund

A sprachbund (Sprachbund, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The languages may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness.

A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as a sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages. Without knowledge of the history of a regional group of similar languages, it may be difficult to determine whether sharing indicates a language family or a sprachbund.

History
In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship (rodstvo) and those arising from convergence due to language contact (srodstvo).

Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз (yazykovoy soyuz 'language union') in a 1923 article. In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German calque of this term, Sprachbund, defining it as a group of languages with similarities in syntax, morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary.

Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague Roman Jakobson, have relaxed the requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy.

A rigorous set of principles for what evidence is valid for establishing a linguistic area has been presented by Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark.

The Balkans
The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to Jernej Kopitar's description in 1830 of Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian as giving the impression of "nur eine Sprachform ... mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie", which has been rendered by Victor Friedman as "one grammar with the [sic] three lexicons".

The Balkan Sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian, the South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian, Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbo-Croatian), Greek, Balkan Turkish, and Romani.

All but one of these are Indo-European languages but from very divergent branches, and Turkish is a Turkic language. Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the infinitive, future tense formation, and others.

The same features are not found in other languages that are otherwise closely related, such as the other Romance languages in relation to Romanian, and the other Slavic languages such as Polish in relation to Bulgaro-Macedonian.

Mainland Southeast Asia
Languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area have such great surface similarity that early linguists tended to group them all into a single family, although the modern consensus places them into numerous unrelated families. The area stretches from Thailand to China and is home to speakers of languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Tai–Kadai, Austronesian (represented by Chamic) and Mon–Khmer families.

Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. A well-known example is the similar tone systems in Sinitic languages (Sino-Tibetan), Hmong–Mien, Tai languages (Kadai) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic). Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (but no tonal distinctions on checked syllables ending in a stop consonant), which was followed by a tone split where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until André-Georges Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin.

Similarly, the unrelated Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Many languages in the region are of the isolating (or analytic) type, with mostly monosyllabic morphemes and little use of inflection or affixes, though a number of Mon–Khmer languages have derivational morphology. Shared syntactic features include classifiers, object–verb order and topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families.

Indian subcontinent
In a classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area", Murray Emeneau laid the groundwork for the general acceptance of the concept of a sprachbund. In the paper, Emeneau observed that the subcontinent's Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of features that were not inherited from a common source, but were areal features, the result of diffusion during sustained contact. These include retroflex consonants, echo words, subject–object–verb word order, discourse markers, and the quotative.

Emeneau specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman. This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions, this area has now become a major field of research in language contact and convergence.

Northeast Asia
Some linguists, such as Matthias Castrén, G. J. Ramstedt, Nicholas Poppe and Pentti Aalto, supported the idea that the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic families of Asia (and some small parts of Europe) have a common ancestry, in a controversial group they call Altaic. Koreanic and Japonic languages, which are also hypothetically related according to some scholars like William George Aston, Shōsaburō Kanazawa, Samuel Martin and Sergei Starostin, are sometimes included as part of the purported Altaic family. This latter hypothesis was supported by people including Roy Andrew Miller, John C. Street and Karl Heinrich Menges. Gerard Clauson, Gerhard Doerfer, Juha Janhunen, Stefan Georg and others dispute or reject this. A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as vowel harmony and agglutination, is that they are due to areal diffusion.

The Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund, in the northeastern part of the Tibetan plateau spanning the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu, is an area of interaction between varieties of northwest Mandarin Chinese, Amdo Tibetan and Mongolic and Turkic languages.

Western Europe
Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe which shared common features. Whorf argued that these languages were characterized by a number of similarities including syntax and grammar, vocabulary and its use as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms and word order which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities; in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His point was to argue that the disproportionate degree of knowledge of SAE languages biased linguists towards considering grammatical forms to be highly natural or even universal, when in fact they were only peculiar to the SAE language group.

Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period. The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.

Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund.

The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact in the time of the Migration Period and later, continuing during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features.

Others

 * Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC
 * in the Ethiopian highlands, Ethiopian Language Area
 * Shimaore and Kibushi on the Comorian island of Mayotte.
 * in the Sepik River basin of New Guinea
 * in the Baltics (northeast Europe)
 * in the Caucasus, though this is disputed
 * the Gilaki and Mazandarani languages with South Caucasian languages
 * several linguistic areas of the Americas, including:
 * Mesoamerican linguistic area
 * Pueblo linguistic area
 * Northwest Coast linguistic area
 * Austronesian and Papuan languages spoken in eastern Indonesia and East Timor
 * East Anatolia—proposed, though currently uncertain

title: Sprachbund