Chapter 55Numeral Classifiers, Ordinals, and Quantifier Syntax

55.1 The three numeral word-classes and the classifier alternation

Hokkaido Ainu numerals appear in three formally distinct word-classes. The numeral prenominal (数連体詞) is the bare cardinal stem that directly precedes a head noun: tu cip 'two boats', iwan kosonte 'six robes'. The numeral noun (数名詞) is the cardinal stem carrying one of two suffixes — -p/-pe for non-human referents or -n/-iw for human referents — and it occupies a post-nominal appositional position: tuki sinep 'one cup (post-nominal)', tun katkemat 'two women'. A third class, the counting-off form (数え上げ), is used in enumeration sequences as an interjection-like particle and is not treated here Nakagawa (2024: 461, 465–466).

The present chapter covers the numeral noun suffixes and their syntax, the periphrastic ordinal strategies, quantifier float, and the universal and approximative quantifiers. The cardinal system, the vigesimal arithmetic, and the 1–20 paradigm are treated in Chapter 54 (The Vigesimal Numeral System); nominal -utar plurality and transnumerality in Chapter 41 (Nominal Number: Transnumerality, -utar, and the Locus of Plurality). Nakagawa (2024: §17.1)

Sources: Nakagawa (2024: 461, 464); Satō (2008: 256–257); Refsing (1986: 110–111).

55.2 The thing-counting suffix -p/-pe

The thing-counting suffix derives from the formal noun p ‘thing (formal noun)’ (alternant pe) that also functions as the general thing-nominalizer treated in Chapter 101 (The Nominalizers -p/-pe and -i/-hi (Participant, Event, Place, Fact)). On the numeral stem it creates a counting noun whose referential domain is any non-human entity, though it can extend to humans in brusque register (see below). The phonological conditioning is regular: the allomorph -p follows vowel-final stems (values 1–5: sine, tu, re, ine, asikne), and -pe follows consonant-final stems (values 6–10: iwan, arwan, tupesan, sinepesan, wan) Nakagawa (2024: 464); Refsing (1986: 110).

The numeral noun carrying -p/-pe occupies the post-nominal appositional position — it follows the noun it quantifies. This is in complementary distribution with the prenominal position of the bare stem. The prenominal precedes the head directly:

The numeral noun follows:

When the referent is contextually recoverable, the numeral noun can stand alone as the head of an NP without an overt co-argument:

Nakagawa characterises the -p/-n split as the native thing/person dichotomy — comparable to Japanese ひとつ vs ひとり and contrasting with Sinitic classifier systems that require an intervening counter word between any numeral and any noun. The parallel with Nivkh, another non-Sinitic language of the region, is also noted Nakagawa (2024: 464).

55.3 The person-counting suffix -n/-iw

The person-counting suffix parallels the thing-counting suffix in its allomorphy: -n after vowel-final stems (values 1–5) and -iw after consonant-final stems (values 6–10) Nakagawa (2024: 464). The suffix -n/-iw is otherwise rare in the Hokkaido Ainu morphological inventory; its other occurrence is in the interrogative hempakiw 'how many people' (from hempak-iw) — see Chapter 51 (Interrogative, Indefinite, and Negative-Polarity Pro-forms).

The primary domain of -n/-iw is human beings: tun katkemat 'two women', asiknen okkayo 'five men'. Nakagawa notes that -p/-pe can also count human referents, but carries a brusquer register; in practice the distinction is weak and speakers vary Nakagawa (2024: 464, exx. 1070–1071). The person-counting suffix extends to composite vigesimal numerals. For 100 (= 5×20), the suffix attaches to the whole compound asiknehotne:

The numeral noun with -n/-iw also combines with the translative copula ne to form a predicative or adverbial phrase expressing numerical composition. In this use the numeral noun functions without any overt head noun:

See also the parallel sinenne 'alone' derived by the same copular contraction, discussed in the ordinals section below.

55.4 Word-classifiers: to 'day' and suy 'time/turn'

Outside the -p/-pe and -n/-iw paradigm, two free nouns function as mensural elements when preceded by a numeral: to ‘day’ and suy ‘time, turn’.

to 'day' follows a numeral prenominal to form a temporal span noun: sine to 'one day'. For values 2 and 3, the idiomatic forms tutko '2 days' and rerko '3 days' are common; from value 4 onwards the additive pattern ine rerko '4 days', asikne rerko '5 days' shows that rerko has bleached from '3 days' to the general day-span slot Nakagawa (2024: 465).

suy 'time, turn' forms the iterative series. The element for 'once' draws on the archaic root ar 'one' (also seen in ar-itak 'one word' and the counting-off base) rather than the regular prenominal sine: arsuy 'once', tusuy 'twice', resuy 'three times'. Intensive reduplication with o- yields otusuy and oresuy 'over and over' Refsing (1986: 108, 111); Nakagawa (2024: 461). The numeral 6 (iwan) has a secondary 'many' meaning in oral literary contexts; iwan suy therefore typically means 'many times' rather than a precise six:

55.5 Classifier or counter? The terminological debate

Whether -p/-pe, -n/-iw, to, and suy constitute "numeral classifiers" is unresolved in the literature, partly because the disagreement is terminological Bugaeva (2012: §5.3) ‹contested›.

Nakagawa argues that Hokkaido Ainu has no numeral classifiers (助数詞) in any meaningful sense. Prenominal numerals attach directly to the noun without an intervening counting word — tu cip 'two boats', re nupuri 'three mountains' — just as English two ships does. The -p vs -n contrast is the native thing/person dichotomy, found in many non-Sinitic numeral systems and present cross-linguistically without Sinitic influence Nakagawa (2024: 461–462, 464).

The typology chapter of Bugaeva (2022) frames the picture differently: it refers to -p/-pe and -n/-iw as "counters" and to to and suy as "word-classifiers", speculating that these may be remnants of a formerly more elaborate noun-classifier system (Handbook 2022, epub — chapter and page are uncalibrated in the current reading). Refsing takes a middle position, calling the suffixes "a rudimentary system of 'classifiers' or 'counters'" while reserving "numeral" for the bare prenominal stem and "number" for the stem plus counter Refsing (1986: 110–111).

The pivot of the disagreement is the definition of "classifier". In the Sinitic sense a classifier is an obligatory mediating element: Mandarin requires 本 in 三本書 'three-CL-book'; no numeral can attach directly to the noun. Hokkaido Ainu has no such requirement: the prenominal numeral combines with any noun without an intervening element. On this definition — Nakagawa's — the suffixes are not classifiers because they are post-nominal, suffixal, and optional relative to the prenominal. On Refsing's and the Handbook's definition they are, because they encode a semantic categorization of the counted entity. Authors citing either view must specify which sense of "classifier" they intend.

55.6 Ordinal expressions

None of the primary Hokkaido Ainu grammars — Nakagawa 2024 §17, Satō 2008 §33, Refsing 1986 §12.4, or Kindaichi and Chiri 1936 — describes a dedicated ordinal word-class or ordinal paradigm Nakagawa (2024: 461–469); Satō (2008: 256–258); Refsing (1986: 110–117). Ordinal meaning is expressed through several periphrastic strategies, two of which are independently attested in the grammars, while others are documented in community discussion ‹corpus-suggested›.

Two attested expressions involve a numeral noun combined with the translative copula ne. The contraction of sinen ne 'being one person' to sinenne yields the lexicalized meaning 'alone, by oneself':

The same copular pattern with the thing-counting noun forms a partitive or distributive expression:

For 'first', the adverb hoskino ‘first, at the beginning’ fills the ordinal-adverbial slot. The superlative phrase iyotta hoski (where iyotta ‘most, superlative’ intensifies hoski ‘beginning’) expresses 'the very first, foremost'. A community discussion notes that ordinals are generally avoided in Hokkaido Ainu — the expression sine to serves both 'one day' and 'the first day' — and that hoskino and iyotta hoski are the standard strategies for 'first'; for higher ordinals, one attested usage is the sequence sine kamuy, tu kamuy, re kamuy 'first, second, third (one)' with kamuy as a generic count noun, and the form iyeere-p has been reported for 'the third (thing)' aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-09, asserted) ‹speculative›. These community-attested strategies await systematic description in the primary grammars.

The iterative series arsuy 'once', tusuy 'twice', resuy 'three times' (§word-classifiers above) overlaps functionally with the ordinal domain when it tracks the sequence of occurrences.

55.7 Quantifier syntax: three positions

The three numeral categories — prenominal, numeral noun, and pure noun predicate — occupy distinct syntactic positions with distinct meaning contributions Nakagawa (2024: 461, 464–465); Refsing (1986: 115–117).

55.8 Quantifier float and the noun–numeral–verb pattern

The appositional numeral noun does not need to remain clause-adjacent to its head noun. It can appear after the verb or in a position outside the canonical NP boundary — a distribution consistent with the broader pronominal-argument and non-configurational character of Hokkaido Ainu discussed in Chapter 94 (Pro-Drop, (Non)configurationality, and the Pronominal-Argument Debate). The pattern illustrated below has the object noun followed by the numeral noun and then the verb:

In this construction sinep is the appositional numeral noun counting the object pasuy, but the two are separated by the verb position. Refsing's Shizunai data include the parallel a=kor mici akihi tun, ren an 'my father's brothers were two or three', where the numeral noun follows a relational noun phrase rather than a simple head Refsing (1986: 116). The noun–numeral.noun–verb pattern is documented as community-observed and structurally consistent with the primary sources aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) ‹corpus-suggested›.

55.9 Numeral–nominal number interactions

A numeral specifying a small count (2 or 3) typically co-occurs with the singular form of a noun that otherwise has a human-plural counterpart, while a large numeral (from 6 upwards), an indefinite quantity, or the quantifier inne 'many' co-occurs with the plural form. Satō states the threshold explicitly (via community discussion attributed to him); the pattern also coheres with Refsing's data on the morphological forms involved:

aynu-corpora Discord (2023–2026) (nukopoli, 2024-11-17, asserted, attributed to Satō); corroborated by Refsing (1986: 115–117) ‹corpus-confirmed›.

Mass-like or uncountable referents stay in the singular regardless of quantity. Under a specified numeral greater than 1, a human-denoting noun may take the associative-plural suffix -utar with phonologically conditioned allomorphy: sine hekaci 'one child' but tu hekattar 'two children' (< hekaci-utar, with assimilation) Refsing (1986: 117). The full -utar paradigm and the transnumerality of bare nouns are treated in Chapter 41 (Nominal Number: Transnumerality, -utar, and the Locus of Plurality); the verbal number interaction belongs to Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms).

55.10 Universal and approximative quantifiers

Several items outside the numeral paradigm proper function as universal or approximative quantifiers.

opitta ‘all (of), every’ (variant obitta) is the universal quantifier 'all of, every'. Its formal status is that of a postpositional adverb — it belongs to the class of originally adverbial postpositions Nakagawa (2024: 280) — and it typically follows the noun phrase or clause it scopes over, distinguishing it positionally from the prenominal numeral. The closely related epitta 'throughout, across the whole' has partly overlapping distribution.

inne ‘many’ (also inne ne 'being many') is the standard approximative 'many'. It licenses the plural verb form and the plural -utar form of the noun in the same way as a large cardinal numeral (see §numeral–nominal number interactions above).

The numeral 6, iwan, has developed a secondary universal-like meaning in oral-literary register. Fixed expressions including iwan suy 'many times', iwan kosonte 'many/six robes' (a gift-register formula), and the intensive noiwan (< no-iwan 'very many') all draw on this conventionalized 'many' reading Nakagawa (2024: 469, exx. 1080–1083). These expressions are genre-marked and do not represent a productive grammaticalization of '6' as a plural marker in everyday speech ‹corpus-confirmed›.

usa ‘various, several’ is an approximative quantifier without a precise numerical value. Its syntactic distribution parallels the prenominal numeral in modifier position, but it is not a numeral in the classifier-paradigm sense treated above.

Distributive plurality and the full three-way interaction among nominal -utar, verbal number, and quantifiers is systematically treated in Chapter 41 (Nominal Number: Transnumerality, -utar, and the Locus of Plurality).