This post is about number and how the Chatino languages (don’t) keep track of whether things are singular or plural. Some other post will talk about the languages’ vigesimal numeral systems.
Apart from the pronouns used to mark the arguments of verbs and the possessors of nouns, the Chatino languages do not track whether entities are singular or plural. So while these languages can you different pronouns to distinguish between ‘you ate’ and ‘y’all ate’ (in Tataltepec ntyakú no’o and ntyakú ma, respectively) nearly all nouns are not specified for number, for example the word xnèʔ means ‘dog’ or ‘dogs’. This by itself isn’t all that remarkable, and many of the world’s languages do this). What’s interesting is the very small set of adjectives in Chatino that do distinguish between singular and plural.
All Chatino languages I know have two adjectives (‘big’ and ‘small’) with suppletive forms, meaning that different forms of each word have different etymologies. The English verb go is suppletive because its past tense form went is derived from an entirely different source than the rest of the verb’s forms. For example, in Tataltepec Chatino, a single small thing and a single big thing would be called piti and klyù, but multiple small and big things would be called swe and tunu. The words for ‘small’ can appear in two derived terms: no piti ‘child’ and no swe ‘children’, making ‘child’ the only noun in the language that has singular and plural forms.
A related thing happens in the Mixtec languages spoken to the north and west of the Chatino languages. Some of the languages in this family do have some plural marking prefixes for nouns, their use is restricted, and these languages are largely are like the Chatino languages in that number is not marked on nouns. What’s curious is that one place where obligatory number marking does appear is in the adjective meaning ‘big’ (or ‘long’ or perhaps ‘tall’). Most often, ‘big (sg.)’ is something like kaʔnu and ‘big (pl.)’ is something like naʔnu). While these aren’t suppletive like the Chatino adjectives (they appear to share the root –aʔnu), it is remarkable that two languages from distinct branches of the Otomanguean family would both happen to obligatorily mark number in this very tiny portion of their lexicons.
Ryan Sullivant 