[Lingtyp] Development of a noun plural affix from *and, *with?

[Larry M Hyman]

Hello everyone,



I have been puzzling over the historical source of a noun plural suffix
/-in/ [iŋ] which was innovated in Limba, a Niger-Congo isolate spoken in
Sierra Leone. While Cobbinah & Lüpke (2014) and Voisin (2015) consider
verbal and pronominal sources of an uncannily similar nasal plural suffix
in the distantly related Nyun subgroup of Atlantic languages of Senegal,
and Creissels (2014: 7-8, 2015: 42; 2024: 479) relates it to an Atlantic
associative marker ('X and people associated with X') reconstructed as
**aN* (Pozdniakov
2015), which Limba does not have, Limba has a homophonous preposition /ín/
‘with, and’ which has the same tone and the same allomorphs *iŋ *and *ni*.


 ba-mán-*íŋ* beŋ 'the visitors' (singular: bà-màŋ 'visitor')

bà-máŋ *íŋ *bá-dàŋ 'a visitor and a hunter'



My question: Is a pathway of *and, *with > plural marker natural (as it
seems to me)? Are there known cases where this has happened?


Thanks very much.



Larry



PS In case anyone would like to know more, Daniel Kamara and I have just
completed a paper "Noun class and plural marking in Limba (Thɔnkɔ dialect)"
which I can send upon request.


References


Cobbinah, Alexander Y. & Friederieke Lüpke. 2014. When number meets
classification. The linguistic expression of number in Baïnounk languages.
In Anne Storch & Gerrit J. Dimmendaal (eds), *Number — Constructions and
semantics. Case studies from Africa, Amazonia, India and Oceania*, 199-220.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.



Creissels, Denis. 2014. Atlantic noun class systems: A typological
approach. In, Aicha Belkadi, Kakia Chatsiou and Kirsty Rowan (eds.).
*Proceedings
of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 4*, 12pp.
London: SOAS.



Creissels, Denis. 2015. Typologie des classes nominales dans les langues
atlantiques. In Denis Creissels & Konstantin Pozdniakov (eds), *Les classes
nominales dans les langues atlantiques*, 7-55. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.



Creissels, Denis. 2024. Noun inflections and gender in Atlantic languages.
In In Friederike Lüpke (ed.), *the Oxford guide to Atlantic languages of
West Africa*, 462-482. Oxford Scholarship Online.
https://academic.oup.com/book/59850/chapter/511380651



Hyman, Larry M. & Daniel Ibrahim Kamara. 2026. Noun class and plural
marking in Limba. Ms. University of California, Berkeley.



Pozdniakov, Konstantin. 2015. Diachronie des classes nominales atlantiques:
morphophonologie, morphologie, sémantique. In Denis Creissels & Konstantin
Pozdniakov (eds), *Les classes nominales dans les langues atlantiques*,
57-102. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.



Voisin, Sylvie. 2015. Sur l’origine du suffixe du pluriel dans le groupe
Nyun-Buy. *Linguistique et Langues Africaines* 1.13-41.

-- 
Larry M. Hyman, Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School
& Director, France-Berkeley Fund, University of California, Berkeley
https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~hyman
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20260308/60f6b942/attachment.htm>