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

[Östen Dahl]

Hi Larry and everyone,

It seems to me that the obvious link would be associative plurals. According to  Daniel & Moravcsik (2013) , Basque forms an associative plural with the conjunction ta ‘and’;

¿Nor     bizi da ets̃eortan? - ¿Or? PeiĨo ta.
‘¿quién vive en esa casa?’ - ‘¿Ahí?Pedro y compañía.’
‘Who lives in this house? – Here? Pedro and others.’

I have not been able to find more information on this short notice, but someone who knows more about these things than I do may be able to add more details to the picture.
Best,
Östen

Reference
Michael Daniel, Edith Moravcsik. 2013. The Associative Plural.
In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.)
WALS Online (v2020.4) [Data set]. Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13950591
(Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/36, Accessed on 2026-03-09.)

Från: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> För David Gil via Lingtyp
Skickat: den 9 mars 2026 05:23
Till: Larry M Hyman <hyman at berkeley.edu>
Kopia: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Development of a noun plural affix from *and, *with?

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<mailto: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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