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

[David Gil]

Hi Larry, everyone,

Not exactly what you're looking for, but a clearly related phenomenon, is
the coexpression of 'and' not with plurality (as per your query) but rather
with the semantically related notion of universal quantification ('all',
'every').  The latter pattern of coexpression is quite common
cross-linguistically, and even features in a WALS map "Conjunctions and
Universal Quantifiers" (https://wals.info/chapter/56).

David

On Mon, Mar 9, 2026 at 11:08 AM Larry M Hyman via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> 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
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>


-- 

David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email: dapiiiiit at gmail.com
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-082113720302
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