Include me out! dual, trial and other grammatical curiosities

Summary

Addressing each other or referring to each other is commonly done by using personal pronouns, such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she’, ‘we’, ‘they’ and so on.

At first glance, a speaker of English sees nothing complex about the word ‘we’, for instance. It simply means a group of two or more people, including the speaker. Likewise, the plural ‘you’ means addressing a group of two or more people, but excluding the speaker. And similarly, ‘they’ means referring to a group of two or more people, but excluding both the speaker and, if present, the person being addressed.

Easy. But why make it so simple when you can complicate things? Some people think much further when it comes to personal pronouns, and have many more words for ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘they’.

INCLUSIVE VERSUS EXCLUSIVE

Many languages use a different ‘we’ depending on whether the person(s) addressed is/are included in the ‘we’. Thus, the inclusive ‘we’ means either ‘you and I’, or ‘you and I and someone else’, while the exclusive ‘we’ denotes ‘he/she and I’ or ‘I and some other people, but not you’.

DUAL

Dual signifies a grammatical number ‘two’ between singular (one) and plural (many). There are peoples on all continents whose grammar counts things according to ‘one, two, many’.

This goes for personal pronouns such as ‘we’ as well: people use the dual form to differentiate between ‘we, just us two’ and ‘we, the whole lot of us’.