sorbian numerals: a typological approach

Bernard Comrie (Leipzig and Santa Barbara)

Sorbian numerals: A typological approach

Abstract

The Sorbian languages basically use a decimal (base 10) numeral system with multiplication and addition, although there are also traces of subtraction and, perhaps, division. Ordinal numerals are suppletive for ‘first’ and ‘second’ only. The order of elements under addition is basically descending, except that the units precede the tens. Numerals have both adjectival and nominal properties, with adjectival properties characterizing lower numerals, nominal properties higher numerals – the detailsare complex. Loanwords are found for higher rather than lower numerals. The data provide interestingconfirmation of several proposed universals of numeral systems.

Keywords: Sorbian, typology, numerals, language contact, loanwords

1. Introduction

Probably any Slavic language will provide material of interest to typologists on the basisof its numeral system, as can be seen for instance in the frequent reference to numerals in relation to agreement in Corbett (1983: 215–240) or in the detailed study of Russian numeral syntax in Mel’cuk (1985).1 The aim of this article is to present some of the salientfacts about numeral systems in the Sorbian languages that are interesting from a typo-logical perspective.

Both Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian are included in the discussion. Beyond the recognition of the two languages, it is also necessary to consider different varieties of eachlanguage. First, there are the two codified standard written (“literary”) languages. As basicsources for these, I have consulted Fasske & Michalk (1980, especially pages 499–527) forUpper Sorbian and Janas (1976, especially pages 143–169) and Starosta (1991, especiallypages 199–203, 209–212) for Lower Sorbian; except where a particular judgment of one ofthese works is at issue, more detailed page references are not given. Second, there are thedialects of each of the two languages, and here I have consulted both Fasske (1975 – maps 1–4, 8–10, and 16–18 are relevant) for the dialects in general and Jentsch (1980) for adetailed study of one dialect, that of Rodewitz an der Spree (Sorbian: Rozwodecy), a (nowheavily endangered, if not extinct) dialect that happens to be rather close to standard Upper Sorbian (Jentsch 1980: 9). Finally, for Upper Sorbian, consideration is also given tothe current spoken language of the younger generation in the Upper Sorbian-speakingheartland, more specifically the communities of Ralbitz-Rosenthal (Sorbian: Ralbicy-Rózant) and Crostwitz (Sorbian: Chróscicy), as described in Scholze (2008); this version

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1 I am grateful to the participants in the workshop held in Cottbus on 2007 December 01 for commentson draft materials for this article, and to Hauke Bartels, Walter Breu, Roland Marti, GunterSpiess, and Manfred Starosta for comments on the draft manuscript.

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will be referred to as “colloquial Upper Sorbian”. The greater attrition of Lower Sorbianmeans that there is no corresponding colloquial Lower Sorbian variety. Examples are fromthe respective standard languages except where otherwise indicated.

One practical problem that should be noted is that native speakers of both Sorbian languages have for some time tended to use German for higher numerals, a point aleadynoted by Bielfeldt (1933: xxxvi), so that while it is possible to obtain information on higher numerals from grammars of the standard languages and from works written in thestandard languages, it is often difficult or impossible to confirm these from the judgmentsof native speakers. This problem arises in particular in the case of dialectal Upper and Lower Sorbian. Colloquial Upper Sorbian has a fully functional numeral system (Scholze2008: 300).

2. Arithmetic structure of Sorbian numerals

As in nearly all Slavic languages (Comrie 1992), and as indeed in probably most lan-guages of the world today (Comrie 2005b), the Sorbian languages have a basically decimal(base 10) numeral system. There are separate lexical items for the first three powers of 10(10 USo dzesac, LSo zases; 100 USo sto, LSo sto, hundert; 1000 USo tysac, tawzynt; LSo tysac, towzynt), and numbers between two of these powers of 10 are expressed throughmultiplication of the lower power to reach the closest multiple of that power that is lowerthan the target value, then addition of any remainder, as illustrated in examples (1a–b).

(1a) dwaj tysac dwe-sc-e dwaj-a-dwa-ceci USotwo.m thousand two.n-hundred-du two-and-two-ty

(1b) dwa tysac/towzynt dwe-sc-e / dwa hundert-atwo.m thousand two.n-hundred-du two.m hundred-du

dwa-a-dwa-zasca LSotwo-and-two-ty

‘two thousand two hundred and twenty-two’

The basic Sorbian numeral system is thus a decimal (base 10) system making use ofmultiplication and addition, so that the general structure of the numerals in (1) can be ex-plicated as ‘2 × 1000 + 2 × 100 + 2 × 10 + 2’, or rather: ‘… + 2 + 2 × 10’, since in both Sorbianlanguages, the only current ordering of the tens and units is with the units before the tens,which corresponds to that of German – see further section 4. The combination of multi-plier and muliplicand is arguably transparent with the hundreds (‘two hundreds’), giventhe fact that both languages have a productive dual – this statement would need somequalification for dialects that have lost the dual or relevant uses thereof, and see furtherfootnote 9. With the tens, there has been some morphophonological merger of multiplierand multiplicand, though the basic structure (‘n tens’) is still transparent, and the formswill be glossed as ‘n-ty’, with -ty as in English sixty 60.

Mucke (1891: 443) notes the existence of a vigesimal system, already obsolescent in histime, in Lower Sorbian for 40, 60, 80, e.g. dwa krot dwazasca, literally ‘two times twenty’,for 40.

Numerals between 21 and 99 (other than the round tens) are expressed regularly bymeans of the formula ‘m and n-ty’, now usually written as a single word in both languages,although older norms preferred three separate words. The teens, as in most European

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languages, have a different formation, with the unit numeral (sometimes slightly modifiedmorphophonologically) followed by USo -nace, LSo -nasco; in examples, this suffix will beglossed as ‘teen’, on the basis of English formations like sixteen 16.2 Although there is somemorphophonological merger at the boundary between the unit and the teen suffix, theSorbian forms remain transparent; there are no forms like English eleven, twelve, Germanelf, zwölf that are synchronically unanalyzable or only partially analyzable.

The use of a “new” word for the appropriate power of 10 is obligatory at 10 and 100, inUpper Sorbian also at 1000, i.e. it is not possible to express 100 as ‘ten-ty’. At 1000, how-ever, Lower Sorbian also productively allowed the possibility of continuing to count inhundreds, as in the examples in (2), which were possible even outside of designations foryears, where the Sorbian languages, like German, allow counting in hundreds from 1100 to 1900. (Note that while German allows elfhundert, literally ‘eleven hundred’, for 1100 indates, it does not allow *zehnhundert for 1000.)

(2a) zases st-ow/hundert-ow LSoten hundred-pl.gen‘one thousand (lit. ten hundreds)’

(2b) jad-nasco st-ow/hundert-ow LSoone-teen hundred-pl.gen‘one thousand one hundred (lit. eleven hundreds)’

This counting in hundreds beyond 999 is not, however, usual in current standard LowerSorbian (Manfred Starosta, personal communication), although Mucke (1891: 443) de-scribes them as the usual spoken forms in his time.

In addition to forms making exclusive use of multiplication and addition, as in themajority of European languages, there are also some forms that are or have been used inthe Sorbian languages that make use of subtraction or, arguably, division. In particular,non-standard forms are attested for older Lower Sorbian that involve subtraction, such asthose in (3).

(3a) pol/ hundert-a mjenjej jadn-ogo LSohalf hundred-gen less one-gen‘forty-nine’

(3b) hundert mjenjej sesc-ich LSohundred less six-gen‘ninety-four’

The attested forms are, incidentally, all consistent with universal 14 of Greenberg (1978:260),3 which says:

Every minuend is a base of the system or a multiple of the base.

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2 The Sorbian, and indeed general Slavic formation is interesting from an areal typological perspective.Although the ‘teen’ element is perhaps no longer synchronically analyzable in the modern Slavic languages, corresponding items in the oldest attestations of Slavic show a transparent structure ‘onten’. This “superessive” formation, using an element meaning ‘on’, is found not only throughout Slavic, but also in Latvian (but not Lithuanian), Rumanian, Albanian, and Hungarian (in Hungarianextending to the twenties).

3 Owing to a technical error, the universal is incorrectly numbered 15 in the original.

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The minuends are all multiples of 10, including 100. Although subtraction is rare inother European languages it is attested, e.g. in Latin un-de-viginti ‘one-from-twenty’ 19.

With respect to division, relevant forms would be those as in (4), which are current in atleast some varieties of both languages – though not in colloquial Upper Sorbian – andwhich express 50 as ‘half of hundred’:

(4a) pol/-st-a USohalf-hundred-gen‘fifty’

(4b) pol/-st-a/pol/ hundert-a LSohalf-hundred-gen‘fifty’

These forms occur alongside the expected and more literary forms like USo pjec-dzesat‘five-ty’, and can also be used in the formation of numerals in the range 51–59, as in the Upper Sorbian forms in (5), and even in subtractive formations like Lower Sorbian (3a)above.

(5) dzewjec-a-pol/-st-a USonine-and-half-hundred-gen‘fifty-nine’

However, as noted by Greenberg (1978: 261), formations as in (4)–(5) do not literallyinvolve division, but rather multiplication by a fraction (i.e. ‘half of hundred’ rather than‘hundred divided by two’), so that they should perhaps be classified as a particular kind of multiplication. Similar forms are found sporadically in other European languages, e.g.hanner cant ‘half hundred’ for 50 in the traditional Welsh counting system.

Finally, in the Sorbian languages we find evidence for the phenomenon of “prospectivefractions”, whereby the fraction ‘n + 1/2’ is expressed as ‘half of the (n + 1)-th’, as in theforms given in (6). This is a special case of what in the typology of numeral systems hascome to be called “overcounting”, i.e. looking up to a numeral higher than n in order toexpress n.

(6a) pol/-dr-a USohalf-second-gen

(6b) pol/-ter-a LSohalf-second-gen‘one and a half (lit. half of second)’

(6c) pol/-trec-a USohalf-third-gen

(6d) pol/-tses-a LSohalf-third-gen‘two and a half (lit. half of third)’

(For similar formations in other Slavic languages, see Comrie 1992: 814–815.) The formsfor ‘one and a half’ are perhaps no longer analyzable synchronically, USo -dr- being a verysyncopated version of the ordinal druh- ‘second’, while LSo -ter- uses a root attested else-where in Slavic (cf. Russian vtor- ‘second’) but distinct from the actual ordinal drug-




‘second’. The Upper Sorbian forms are described as “gebräuchlich” (‘customary’) byFasske & Michalk (1980: 523), while the Lower Sorbian forms are given in Starosta’s(1991: 202) introductory textbook, though younger speakers of Upper Sorbian know only‘one and a half’ (Walter Breu, p.c.), while in Lower Sorbian ‘one and a half’ and ‘two anda half’ are current, ‘three and a half’ and higher forms increasingly unusual (ManfredStarosta, p.c.).4 The form for ‘one and a half’ is also attested in forming multiples of 100,in the forms given in (7); while (7a) is again not known to younger speakers of Upper Sorb-ian (Walter Breu, p.c.), Mucke (1891: 443) describes such forms as the usual ones in bothLower and Upper Sorbian of his time.

(7a) pol/-dr-a st-a USohalf-second-gen hundred-gen

(7b) pol/-ter-a st-a LSohalf-second-gen hundred-gen‘one hundred and fifty (lit. half of second hundred)’

3. Ordinals

As the sample Upper and Lower Sorbian forms in (8) show, both Sorbian languageshave (strong) suppletive ordinal formations for ‘first’ and ‘second’. While some of thehigher ordinals are irregular, in the sense that no general rule will predict the forms for‘third’ and ‘fourth’ from those for ‘three’ and ‘four’, for instance, for all higher ordinalsthere is at least clear formal similarity between that ordinal and the corresponding car-dinal.

(8a) Cardinal Ordinal1 jedyn preni USo2 dwaj druhi3 tri treci4 styri stwórty5 pjec pjaty6 sesc sesty

(8b) 1 jaden predny LSo2 dwa drugi3 tsi tsesi4 styri stwórty5 pes pety6 sesc sesty

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4 A parallel formation is found in German. Thus andert-halb ‘one and a half’, literally ‘other-half’ wasoriginally ‘second-half’ i.e. ‘half of the second’. Higher formations are attested in German, but are atbest obsolescent; only a minority of native speakers of German I have asked correctly interpret theopening line of the aria Dritthalb Jahr bin ich dein Weib sung by the dyer’s wife in Richard Strauss’sopera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) –‘I have been your wife for two and ahalf years’, not three and a half (dritt-halb, literally ‘third-half’).

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Stolz & Veselinova (2005: 219) note that there is a strong cross-linguistic tendency,with only occasional exceptions, for languages with (strong) suppletive ordinals to confinethem to the lowest numerals, i.e. if a language has a (strong) suppletive ordinal for thenumber n, then it will nearly always have (strong) suppletive ordinals for all numbers lowerthan n. The Sorbian languages, with (strong) suppletive ordinals for 1 and 2, conform tothis universal.5

4. Order of elements under addition

As in the majority of the world’s languages that have numeral systems going up intohigher numerals, the basic ordering principle in the Sorbian numerals is “higher beforelower”, but with the one significant exception that the units are ordered before the tens, so that in example (1) the order is: thousands – hundreds – units – tens; contrast Englishthousands – hundreds – tens – units, with a consistent order from higher to lower (except inthe teens, where forms like six-teen are analyzable as unit – ten). The Sorbian order is thesame as in German, and is also found in some other Slavic languages in close contact withGerman, e.g. Slovenian (tri-in-dvajset ‘three-and-two-ty’), Czech (where the type tri-a-dva-cet ‘three-and-two-ty’ exists alongside dva-cet tri ‘two-ty three’ 23). (At least in LowerSorbian, the order tens before units, e.g. dwazasca a dwa ‘twenty and two’, was still normalin some dialects in Mucke’s time (Mucke 1891: 443).)

These formations are relevant to a pair of universals, numbered 26 and 27, formulatedby Greenberg (1978: 273):

If in a language, in any sum the smaller addend precedes the larger, then the same orderholds for all smaller numbers expressed by addition.

If in a language, in any sum the larger addend precedes the smaller, then the same orderholds for all larger numbers expressed by addition.

These universals allow languages that consistently order from higher to lower, such asMandarin Chinese, as in example (9).

(9) san-bai wu-shí sìthree-hundred five-ten four‘three hundred and fifty-four’

They also allow languages which consistently use the reverse order, such as severalvarieties of Malagasy (the indigenous Austronesian language of Madagascar), includingthe standard language, as in example (10) (Rajaonarimanana 2001: 67).

(10) efatra amby dima-mpolo sy telo-njatofour plus five-ten and three-hundred‘three hundred and fifty-four’

The Sorbian languages exhibit the possibility of having the order “lower before higher”for lower numerals (specifically, from 11 through 99), as in the forms in examples

Bernard Comrie, Sorbian numerals: A typological approach

5 The details differ, incidentally, from Modern Standard German, where only ‘first’ (erst-, cf. ein ‘one’)is (strong) suppletive, but zweit- ‘second’ is clearly related to zwei ‘two’; however, Old and MiddleHigh German had (strong) suppletive ander ‘second’, as do some modern dialects.

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(11)–(12), but shifting to the order “higher before lower” for higher numerals (specifically,the hundreds and thousands), as in example (1).

(11a) jed-nace USoone-teen

(11b) jad-nasco LSoone-teen‘eleven’

(12a) jedyn-a-dwa-ceci USoone-and-two-ty

(12b) jaden-a-dwa-zasca LSoone-and-two-ty‘twenty-one’

(This is not quite the same as German, since German elf ‘eleven’ is not synchronicallyanalyzable into two morphemes, and such an analysis of zwölf ‘twelve’ is questionable, i.e.these numerals are irrelevant to the issue of order of elements, and the order “lower beforehigher” only begins with drei-zehn ‘thirteen’ (lit. three-teen).) Greenberg’s universalwould disallow a language which had the opposite pattern to the Sorbian languages, i.e.where the number 2222 was expressed ‘twenty, two, two hundred, two thousand’.6

5. Adjectival versus nominal properties

One of the ways in which Slavic numerals have contributed to the development of the typology of numeral systems – as can be seen, for instance, in Corbett (1983: 224–236) – isin the distribution of adjectival and nominal properties of numerals, with the typologicalgeneralization being that in numeral systems that distribute adjectival and nominal properties across the system, adjectival properties tend strongly to correlate with lower numerals, nominal properties with higher numerals (Greenberg 1978: 285; and for Slavic,Corbett 1983: 224–236). In other words, one can in general say that if numeral n in a parti-cular language has a particular adjectival property, then so do all lower numerals; while if a numeral n in a particular language has a particular nominal property, then so do allhigher numerals.7 In the earliest relevant attestations of Slavic, the division was particu-larly clear: The numerals 1–4 were adjectival, agreeing in gender and case with their head

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6 In fact, I know of one language variety that has precisely this order, namely the Nosy Be dialect ofMalagasy; see further Comrie (2005a: 225–226). Since languages with the consistent order “lower before higher” are also rare – I know of Malagasy (most varieties) and one of the systems in ClassicalArabic – the precise validity of Greenberg’s universals is perhaps questionable, although many languages from across the world do provide evidence for a division “lower before higher” with theteens versus “higher before lower” for higher numerals, or even a division within the teens, e.g. Italian has “lower before higher” up to se-dici ‘six-teen’ 16, then “higher before lower” from dici-as-sette ‘teen-linker-seven’ 17.

7 There are occasional exceptions, e.g. in Latin the numerals 1–3 and also 200–900 have the adjectivalproperty of agreeing with their head noun in gender and case, while the intermediate numerals 4–100are invariable; but in general the universal is borne out.

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noun;8 the numerals 5 and above were nominal, governing a noun phrase in the genitiveplural. The many changes that different Slavic languages have undergone, in particulardifferent kinds of analogy and reanalysis, have substantially altered this original picture,but nonetheless within the constraints of the universal.

Since some relevant issues are discussed in the contribution on grammatical number byGvozdanovic in the present volume, the discussion here will be restricted to the distri-bution of two particular features, one adjectival and one nominal. The adjectival featurewill be agreement, especially case agreement, between the numeral and head noun. Thenominal feature will be government of the noun in the genitive plural. Only numeralsoccurring with a head noun will be considered, as only here are the relevant distinctionsobservable. (In absolute usage, numerals normally decline in all varieties.)

The numeral ‘one’ agrees in case and gender with its head noun in both Sorbian langua-ges. Indeed, it even agrees in number, since the plural is used with pluralia tantum, e.g.USo jedne durje ‘one door’, where durje is grammatically plural even when referring to asingle door, and jedne is the plural form of the numeral, non-virile gender (i.e. used withnouns other than those denoting male humans). In standard usage, the numerals ‘two’,‘three’, and ‘four’ also agree in case and (partially) in gender with the head noun, althoughin colloquial Upper Sorbian usage ‘three’ and ‘four’ are also found invariable, thus losingthis adjectival property, and occasionally even governing a noun in the genitive pluralwhen the whole noun phrase is nominative or accusative (Scholze 2008: 79), thus acquir-ing the nominal property of governing a genitive plural (see below). This construction inthe standard languages can be illustrated by the Upper Sorbian examples in (13).

(13a) styri konj-e USofour.nom horse-pl.nom‘four horses’

(13b) ze styrj-omi konj-emiwith four-ins horse-pl.ins‘with four horses’

In example (13b), the preposition z(e) ‘with’ governs the instrumental case.In the standard languages, the numerals from ‘million’ up behave in all respects like

nouns, and are followed consistently by the genitive plural. For the numerals ‘hundred’–‘thousand’, the numeral itself is always invariable in attributive position. In current usage,both Upper and Lower Sorbian do not even show number in the word for ‘thousand’, i.e.2000 is USo dwaj tysac LSo dwa tysac; however, earlier norms required dwaj tysacaj, dwatysaca, with ‘thousand’ in the dual, and likewise for the plural, with a transparent combina-tion of multiplier and multiplicand.9


8 Throughout, the terms “head” and “attribute” will be used to denote the notional head and attributein the numeral phrase: In a numeral phrase with expressed numeral and noun, the numeral is the attribute, the noun the head. No stand will be taken on the vexed syntactic headedness of such constructions, as the issue is not directly relevant to the questions at hand.

9 If one analyzes the hundreds like USo LSo dwe-sce ‘two hundred’, USo tri-sta LSo tsi-sta ‘three hundred’ as productive combinations with a multiplier numeral and the appropriate dual or pluralform of sto ‘hundred’, then ‘hundred’ would have a nominal property, namely that of showing number, that does not hold of ‘thousand’, in violation of the general principle that if a lower numeralhas a nominal property, so do all higher numerals. However, an alternative analysis would treat thehundreds as learnt as units, like the teens and tens, and unlike the thousands.

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More generally, for numerals in the range ‘five’ – ‘thousand’ one can speak of a generaltendency across different varieties of the languages, with various exceptions, some ofwhich will be discussed below, as follows. The numeral itself is typically invariable, i.e. doesnot have the adjectival property of agreement with its head noun. As for the head noun,there is a difference between the nominative(-accusative) on the one hand and the obliquecases on the other. If the numeral phrase is in the nominative(-accusative), then the nounappears in the genitive plural, i.e. the numeral here shows the nominal property of govern-ing the genitive plural. If the numeral phrase is in an oblique case, then the head noun willshow the appropriate case, i.e. here the numeral does not have the nominal property ofgoverning the case of the head noun. These possibilities are illustrated in examples (14)from Upper Sorbian.

(14a) tysac dzel/acerj-ow USothousand worker-pl.gen‘a thousand workers (nom)’

(14b) z tysac dzel/acerj-emiwith thousand worker-pl.ins‘with a thousand workers’

Some varieties do, however, have the possibility of the numeral agreeing with the headnoun, with the exception of the always invariable USo LSo pol/sta ‘fifty’.10 In standardUpper Sorbian, numerals in the range ‘five’ – ‘ninety-nine’ have special virile forms, usedoptionally in the nominative only for nouns denoting male humans, which thus showgender agreement with their head noun; the head noun is in the nominative plural, i.e. oneeffectively also has case agreement. In the oblique cases, agreement in case of the numeralwith the head noun (irrespective of gender) is also possible. This is illustrated in example(15), where invariable pjec would also be possible throughout, although (15a) would thenbe pjec muz-ow, with the genitive plural of the head noun.

(15a) pjec-o muz-ojo USofive-vir.nom man-pl.nom‘five men’

(15b) z pjec-omi muz-emi/blid-amiwith five-ins man-pl.ins/table-pl.ins‘with five men/tables’

Standard Lower Sorbian differs on some points: the gender value is animate rather thanvirile, i.e. there are special optional forms if the head noun denotes an animate entity(human being or animal); if the animate forms are used, they must be declined; the otherforms may be declined, although usually they are not. Furthermore, in Lower Sorbian thenumerals ‘eleven’ – ‘ninety’ have a single, gender-neutral form in the nominative/citationform (e.g. jadnasco ‘eleven’), but gender differentiation in the oblique cases if the numeral

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10 This formation for ‘fifty’ is thus a clear exception in that some higher numerals can have the adjectivalproperty of agreement which this numeral lacks. In a sense this is parallel to the exceptions discussedin footnote 7, though it should be noted that in the Sorbian languages this exceptional behavior is atleast in part explainable in terms of the lexical item’s internal structure as ‘half of hundred’, whichdoes not provide the basis for declension that other numerals possess.

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is declined; with masculine animate nouns in the nominative, the numerals 11–19 can befollowed by the nominative plural, i.e. despite the lack of a morphological distinctionbetween animate and inanimate with a numeral like jadnasco, the syntactic distinctionremains.

In non-standard varieties, deviations from these patterns may be observed, includingnon-occurrence of forms that are optional in the standard languages. In colloquial UpperSorbian, the numerals ‘five’ and above in attributive use are invariable, and in the nomina-tive(-accusative) the following head noun stands in the nominative(-accusative) plural(Scholze 2008: 78–79), i.e. these numerals lack both the relevant adjectival and nominalproperties. (However, in colloquial Upper Sorbian the genitive plural is not completelyexcluded – Walter Breu, p.c. – suggesting some retention of nominal properties.)

Summarizing, the numerals ‘one’ – ‘four’ are adjectival, agreeing in case with their headnoun and not governing the case of that head noun. The numerals from ‘million’ up arenominal, taking the case appropriate to their semantic/syntactic role and governing thehead noun in the genitive plural.11 Intermediate numerals have a tendency to lack adjec-tival properties (in particular, they do not agree in case with their head noun), and to havethe nominal property of governing the head noun in the genitive plural, though this latterproperty is restricted to the nominative(-accusative); in oblique cases, these numeralstypically neither agree nor govern, i.e. lack both adjectival and nominal properties. How-ever, in the range ‘five’ – ‘ninety’ there are options for case (and gender) agreement of thenumeral with its head noun, and restricted possibilities for absence of government in thenominative(-accusative), i.e. with the head noun in the nominative(-accusative).

It is, incidentally, important to note that the relevant nominal property is specificallygovernment of a following genitive plural, since this is precisely what one finds withnon-numeral nouns used as quantifiers with a count noun, in expressions of the type ‘thenumber of apples’. It is not the concept of “government” in general, which has a potentiallymuch broader scope than the nominal property that is relevant here. This takes on particu-lar importance because of changes in the use of the dual form of nouns in colloquial UpperSorbian, as documented by Scholze (2008: 135–137), though also noted for the dialect ofRodewitz by Jentsch (1980: 96–97). In these varieties, the dual is found only after thenumeral ‘two’ and after ‘both’, is obligatory in this position, and cannot otherwise be usedto denote two entities. One thus finds the dual in colloquial Upper Sorbian example (16),but the dual would not have been possible to denote two brothers without the numeral.

(16) dwaj bratr-aj coll USotwo.m brother-du‘two brothers’

What this means is the dual in these varieties is now governed by the numeral ‘two’, butcrucially this is not the kind of government that one would find with a non-numeral nounused as a quantifier in examples like ‘the number of apples’. The fact that government is not found in colloquial Upper Sorbian with numerals ‘five’ and above and only occa-sionally with ‘three’ and ‘four’ is thus not a counterexample to the generalization that if a


11 However, for Lower Sorbian Janas (1976: 157) gives only examples with agreement, despite his generalization “Diese Zahlenbegriffe sind Substantive und werden wie diese gebraucht” [“Thesenumber concepts are nouns and are used as such”] and the exclusive citation of examples with gov-ernment in Starosta (1991: 201).

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nominal property is found with a particular numeral, then it will also be found with allhigher numerals.

Incidentally, in the dialect of Rodewitz, Jentsch (1980: 96–97) notes, albeit with somediffidence as to the reliability of the data (which are not from natural discourse), sporadicextension of the use of the dual to the numeral ‘three’. One might compare this with thedevelopment in Russian, where the etymological dual (now usually homophonous with thegenitive singular) is governed by the numerals ‘two’–‘four’, a further extension of the pro-cess that seems already to have started in the Rodewitz dialect.

6. Loans

As in other European languages, the lexical items for numerals from ‘million’ upwardsin the Sorbian languages are loans, as in USo LSo milion ‘million’ and miliarda ‘milliard’;12

in Upper Sorbian there is also a colloquial variant for ‘million’, namely miliona (femininegender, versus masculine milion, the former presumably mirroring the gender rather thanthe form of German Million).

The inherited Slavic lexical items for numerals through 100 have survived continuouslyinto the modern Sorbian languages, although in Lower Sorbian at the time of the lan-guage’s standardization the German loan hundert was more usual than the indigenous sto‘hundred’. For ‘thousand’, neither language shows continuous retention of the indigenousSlavic form, using instead the German loan USo tawzynt, LSo towzynt (or counting inhundreds, as in (2a–b)). The current form in the standard languages USo LSo tysac‘thousand’ is a neologism (Stone 1971: 89), although one that has consolidated itselfcompletely in colloquial Upper Sorbian (Walter Breu, p.c.), perhaps through its use in theschool system.

It has been noted, for instance by Greenberg (1978: 289), that when cardinal numeralsare borrowed, it is typically the higher numerals that are borrowed, to such an extent thatone can formulate a near exceptionless universal that if a language borrows a numerallexical item n, then it will also borrow all numeral lexical items higher than n. The Sorbianlanguages provide interesting evidence consistent with this claim. In all varieties, numeralsfrom ‘million’ up are borrowed. Traditionally, this also applied to the word for ‘thousand’.In Lower Sorbian, the word for ‘hundred’ was usually the form borrowed from German, at least until standardization. There is also evidence from actual practice in non-literaryoral discourse that the widespread use of German numerals is more likely with highernumerals, as noted for instance by Bayer (2006: 86–88), on the basis of a dialect corpus that is overall rather heterogeneous but consistent in the relevant respect: in this corpus,numerals above 10 are particularly likely to be borrowed.

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12 Though used as a translation here, the word milliard for 109 is not current in any mainstream varietyof English. This value is expressed in American and, increasingly, other varieties of English as billion,potentially confusing in that the German cognate Billion (likewise USo LSo bilion, colloquial USo biliona) stands for 1012. In traditional British usage, 109 can only be expressed as thousand million(and billion is 1012, as in German).

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7. Conclusions

The confrontation of the Sorbian numeral systems and typology provides fascinatinginsights in both directions. Phenomena that might seem to be idiosyncratic to Sorbian findtheir position within a general typological framework, as with the discussion of formationsof the type pol/sta for ‘fifty’. Equally, typology can benefit from the Sorbian data. Althoughthe material discussed in this article does not provide any striking counterexamples tocurrently widely maintained constraints on numeral systems, it does show interestingvariation within these constraints, as with the distribution of adjectival and nominalproperties or the different patterns of borrowing of numerals in the interplay betweenmassive language contact and linguistic purism.

Abbreviations

coll USo colloquial Upper Sorbian n neuterdu dual nom nominativegen genitive pl pluralins instrumental USo Upper SorbianLSo Lower Sorbian vir virilem masculine

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Bernard ComrieMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary AnthropologyDeutscher Platz 6D - 04103 Leipzig, [email protected]

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sorbian numerals: a typological approach

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