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

Mon Mar 9 07:18:16 UTC 2026

Thanks, Östen. We did consider an associative use of 'and' but
unfortunately Limba doesn't have such a usage today, I did mention Denis'
idea that the plural suffix comes from an associative marker *aN in the
Nyun languages, which we considered. You made me realize that I forgot to
mention in my posting that the plural suffix /-ín/ cannot be added to
proper nouns, where an associative plural would be most expected. Here's
footnote 31 in the paper Daniel Kamara and I just wrote up:

Creissels (2014: 8) gives the Nyun Guñaamolo example Asan-aŋ ‘Assane and
other people associated with him’. Limba, however, does not have such an
associative marker, and it is in fact not possible to add /-in/ to a proper
noun. Thus, Kamára cannot become *Kamárɛ̂ŋ (or anything else involving
/-ín/). To express something like ‘Kamara and those associated with him’
one has to revert to the clan name, in this case *bi-yenke beŋ* ‘the
Kamaras’. Similarly, ‘Bangura and those associated with him’ would be
expressed as *bi-moyni beŋ* ‘the Banguras’.

On Sun, Mar 8, 2026 at 11:05 PM Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se> wrote:

> 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> 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
>
>
>
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>
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>
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>
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>

-- 
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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