Question Words and Relative Pronouns

110 a. Ly-kanaba to firobero ken ly-dykha no dimana-n. he-hear the tapir and he-see it stand-SUB ‘He heard the tapir and he saw it standing.’ b. De ken da-retho osy-fa. I and my-wife go-FUT ‘I and my wife will go.’ Unlike ken, the conjunctions mathi ‘andwith’ and matho ‘andwith’ are used only to con- join nominal constituents. Mathi is used when the constituent following it has the feature [+male] see the discussion of gender features in Section 2.3.1.2, and matho is used when the following constituent is [–human] or [+human –male]. Both of these words are proba- bly derived from oma ‘with’ plus the relativization suffixes -thi and -tho see discussion of event verb suffixes in Section 2.4.1.3. 111 a. De matho da-retho osy-fa. I andwith my-wife go-FUT ‘My wife and I will go.’ b. Balhin da-retho mathi th-aithi osy-n foto-nro ... although my-wife and her-son go-SUB town-toward ‘Although my wife and her son went to town ...’ Manthan ‘or’ may be used only to join clauses and usually precedes each of the clauses conjoined. 112 Manthan l-osy-n manthan th-osy-n, kia kho d-eitha. or he-go-SUB or she-go-SUB, that not I-know ‘Whether he or she is going, that I don’t know.’

2.6.3 Numerals

The traditional Arawak counting system in Suriname uses a combination of base-five, base-ten, and base-twenty numbers. The numbers one through four, aba, bian, kabyn, and bithi, are primitives. ‘Five’ abadakhabo is a combination of aba ‘one’ and da-khabo ‘my hand.’ ‘Six’ through ‘nine’ are built using the first four numbers plus thian no known meaning. ‘Ten’ is bian-da-khabo ‘two-my-hand’. 58 ‘Twenty’ is aba loko ‘one man’. All other numbers are composed of combinations of these terms see Figure 11. Although this counting system exists, it is used mostly for the numbers one through nineteen, at least in Suriname; the Dutch numbers are rapidly replacing the Arawak numbers for counting beyond nineteen. 59 2.6 Functors 49 58 De Goeje 1928:188 and Hickerson 1953:185 document another system for counting from ten to twenty using a morpheme kotibana meaning “on the surface of the foot” which I assume is kothi-bana ‘foot-expanse’. None of the Arawaks I have questioned about this counting system have heard of it or accept it. It may be that this system is or was in use in Guyana. 59 Older speakers take great delight in quizzing young people on whether they know how to count in Arawak. Most young people do not know the numbers above nineteen, and many do not know them above ten.