Writing first appears with the beginnings of urban civilisation and the emergence of the state in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) and Egypt’s Nile Valley at the end of the 4th millennium bc. This chapter describes the many and different contributions of the technology of writing and the force and impacts achieved with the revolutionary innovation.

The seemingly idiosyncratic behavior of numerals in Russian and other Slavic languages has long puzzled linguists. This entry describes the core phenomena, taking Russian as a point of departure. Significant differences in other Slavic languages are also identified, since a central problem of analysis is how variation across Slavic might be accommodated. The core data issues concern case and agreement, the former with respect to the phrase containing the numeral, the latter both internal to the numeral phrase as well as between it and the predicate. Related phenomena exhibited by other quantity expressions are also presented. In the course of the presentation, several conceptual approaches are briefly identified, and the reader is directed to relevant research.

This chapter focuses on how numbers are represented according to the grammar of Chinese. The rules governing the usage of basic, ordinal, and multiple numbers are introduced as well as their application in decimals, fractions, and approximations. Several special usages involving different forms of the same numeral are explained.

This chapter uses data from a range of Romance languages to illustrate the different definitions of the notion of suppletion in the linguistic literature, and to offer a typology of suppletion (notable the difference between ‘incursive’ and phonologically induced suppletion). Suppletion may be most usefully viewed simply as an extreme contrast between unity of meaning, on the one hand, and disunity of the forms expressing that meaning, on the other. The typology and distribution of Romance suppletions is described, for example, from the numeral system, from the system of marking comparatives in adjectives, from the inflexional morphology of personal pronouns, from the inflexional morphology or verbs, nouns, and adjectives. While the Romance languages provide cross-linguistically typical illustrations of suppletion in its different manifestations, the Romance data are particularly thought-provoking with regard to, among other things, (i) the particular role of synonymy between lexemes in determining the emergence of incursive suppletion in diachrony; (ii) the role of existing abstract patterns of alternation in providing ‘templates’ for the paradigmatic distribution of suppletive alternants; and (iii) the role of phonological resemblance as a determinant of incursive suppletion.

Hausa retains the widespread Chadic three-term system of masculine singular, feminine singular, and plural (gender neutral). This is reflected in nominal forms and in agreement patterns. With a few grammatical morphemes, e.g. the Linker (na/ta/na) the masculine singular and the plural share the same marker. Tense–Aspect–Mood (TAM) is generally indicated by an overt marker after the subject pronoun and before the verb. The finaln in the Completive paradigm is not a TAM marker as often said, but rather a plural formative. The marker in the Subjunctive is zero. This form historically also indicated the Aorist, which still occurs but in the negative only. The causative is and was formed syntactically using a main verb sâa ‘to cause’ (lit. ‘to put’) and not by means of a morphological extension on the verb. Indirect objects have changed significantly from Old Hausa, in word order, in the form of the marker(s), and in the specific pronouns used. Verbs in the grade system vary in their pre-indirect object usage. Reflexives are built on the noun ‘head’, the question being whether they originally might have employed ‘body’ instead, which is now found in reciprocals.

This chapter focuses on the differences in how languages construe their numbers.

Word formation in Germanic languages mainly takes place by means of compounding and affixation. Compounds are usually right-headed, and there is often a linking element in N+N-compounds that derives historically from a case ending. In addition to endocentric compounds there are also copulative compounds. Compounding also takes place with roots of Greek and Latin origin that do not occur as words by themselves. Some compound constituents have developed into affixoids. Affixation is used to derive words of major categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Some of these affixes behave phonologically similar to compound constituents. Many nonnative affixes, identified on the basis of sets of borrowed nonnative complex words, are being used in word formation as well. Other mechanisms of word formation are affix substitution, conversion, reduplication, prosodic morphology, abbreviation, and blending. For the construction of numerals above 20, syntactic coordination may be used. The word formation patterns of Germanic languages have been strongly influenced by contact with Greek, Latin, and French. In addition, they have been influenced by contact with English. Individual languages have borrowed some of their morphology and complex words from another Germanic language, and Yiddish has been strongly influenced by various non-Germanic languages.

Chapter 6 focuses on the interface between morphology and syntax. We discuss case, postpositions, delimiters, nominalization, and numerals. We look at nominative, accusative, and genitive cases, describing their distribution and allomorphy and devote special attention to contexts where nominative and accusative usage is interchangeable or nearly so. We introduce the case marking postpositions: dative, locative, direction, goal, source, conjunctive, and disjunctive. The three most common delimiters – particles marking association with focus – are introduced with their properties. We discuss three nominalization processes, derived from four distinct parts of speech. We present constructions related to numerality, including cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, numeral classifier phrases, and the marking of plurality. As Korean speakers have been using Chinese characters from early in the Common Era, the Sino-Korean stratum has heavily impacted Korean morphosyntax, and we see this impact particularly in numerality. We describe the well-known “ubiquitous” nature of the Korean plural marker tul, which appears not only on pluralized NPs, but on other parts of speech as well.