Dvandva

A dvandva (Sanskrit: dvandva "pair") is a linguistic compound in which multiple individual nouns are concatenated to form an agglomerated compound word in which the conjunction 'and' has been elided to form a new word with a distinct semantic field. So, for instance, the individual words 'brother' and 'sister' may be agglomerated to 'brothersister' to express "siblings". The grammatical number of such constructs is often plural or dual. The term dvandva was borrowed from Sanskrit, a language in which these linguistic compounds are common.

Dvandvas also exist in Avestan, the Old Iranian language related to Sanskrit, as well as in numerous Indo-Aryan languages descended from the Prakrits. Several far-eastern languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Atong (a Tibeto-Burman language of India and Bangladesh) and Korean also have dvandvas. Dvandvas may also be found occasionally in European languages, but are relatively rare.

Examples include:

Dvandvas should not be confused with agglutination, which also concatenates words but is a different process.

There are two or three kinds of dvandva compounds in Sanskrit, depending on classification.

The first, and most common kind, the itaretara dvandva, is an enumerative compound word, the meaning of which refers to all its constituent members. The resultant compound word is in the dual or plural depending on the total number of described individuals. It takes the gender of the final member in the compound construction. Examples:

Compare Greek Αβαρόσλαβοι /avaˈɾoslavi/ "the Avars and the Slavs (two distinct tribes acting as a unit)", similarly with case and number marking displayed only on the last part of the compound, the first having the form of the word root)

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