The Numeral System in Koromfe language of Arbinda

Abstract

Abstract: This article deals with the numeral system in the koromfe language of Arbinda. The main research question is: how does the koromfe variant of Arbinda’s numbering system differ from the system of Pobé Mengao already described? From a bibliographic research followed by a collection of data from oral sources by semi-structured interview with speakers of the two variants of Koromfe, a corpus was compiled on cardinal and ordinal numerals. The analysis took into account the lexical, morphological and syntactic level. The results show that in the koromfe variant of Arbinda, the numbers 8 and 9 are expressed according to the mathematical principle of subtraction based on the number 10, unlike the koromfe variant of Mengao where these numbers are designated by simple specific names. Compared to surrounding languages for the same numbers, Fulfulde, an Atlantic type language, adopts a principle of addition based on 5 while Moore, a Gur type language, uses specific names. At the syntactic level, the ordinal numerals in koromfe of Arbinda have the particularity of varying in gender (human/non-human) and in number with the nouns that they determine. This phenomenon must now be taken into account not only in the typological consideration of Niger-Congo languages according to numeral systems, but also in the didactics of mathematics in a bilingual context in this area. Keywords: numeral system, typology, didactics, linguistic description