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According to the evolution of the English language, certain quantifiers (both, either, neither, each I think this is exhaustive) are remnant of the older dual number.

However, Japanese, if I recall her linguistic evolution correctly, never had a dual number. So how do Japanese language speakers quantify over dual elements? That is, what is the idiomatic Japanese version of usage of both, either, neither, and each?

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    Both is possibly a remnant of a pre-Proto-Germanic dual, but that’s only diachronically relevant – the dual has been lost for millennia and has no influence on Modern English at all. Either and neither are not duals at all (except to the extent that the comparative rather than the superlative tends to be used when only two elements are compared). Japanese doesn’t really have grammatical number at all. But you don’t need to have an actual dual number in order to have specific phrases and constructions for dealing with pairs of two.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 10:57
  • Japanese referred to as her?? What do you mean by dual number? Anyway, this forum is for linguistics, not translation.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 14:58
  • @Lambie PIE *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s had feminine gender, and it remained feminine gender in Latin lingua, Old English tunge :) .
    – Arfrever
    Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 15:04
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    Also note that Japanese usually does not use distinct positive and negative pronouns/whatever (like either versus neither, everybody versus nobody, always versus never). For negated meaning, verb itself should be negated. E.g. 「私はいつも肉を食べない。」 = "I always do not eat meat." = "I never eat meat." (食べる = "eat", 食べない = "eat.NEG")
    – Arfrever
    Commented Oct 19, 2023 at 15:22
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    @HolyKnowing Hahaha Nabokov is a literary writer. In literary writing, you can basically do as you like.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 20, 2023 at 15:50

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