[PLUG-TALK] A pair of pants (was: software program)

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:14:33 -0800 (PST)
Gregory Salter <winterbeastie at yahoo.com> dijo:

>This sounds like the age-old question of why do we call it a pair of
>pants when there's only one garment there?

By the same logic that makes English speakers say "a pair of scissors."
It's actually not logic. It is about patterns. Human languages are
devoid of logic (with a salute of the finger variety to Chomsky); rather
they are made of wholes and patterns (syntagms and paradigms).

In Spanish the usual term for "a pair of scissors" is "una tijera." But
I hear many speakers (especially Mexicans) say "las tijeras." And pants
are "pantalones" to all Spanish speakers, plural as in English. 

Nouns are not marked for number in many languages. Indo-European nouns
were marked for singular, dual, and plural. The dual marker leveled into
the plural marker early in the southern reflexes of Indo-European, but
survived in the Germanic family until as late as Anglo-Saxon and
Gothic, and in the Celtic family survives to the present day. Even in
present day Indo-European languages there are always words for "both"
and "pair," relics of the dual syntax. Consider also the Greek
prefixes "mono-," "di-," and "poly," or their Latin equivalents "uni-,"
'bi-," and "multi," additional evidence of previous states of the
languages.

JJJ, linguist semipotentiary, shutting up lest this become a lecture.