maysa / dua + Linker

Place maysa ‘one’ or dua ‘two’ before the counted noun. Under the following-sound linker convention taught in the supplied lessons, use a before a consonant-initial word and nga before a vowel-initial word. The numeral remains unchanged. A count of two does not require a reduplicated plural noun.

The resulting phrase names a counted item or group and can follow an existence expression. Contrast dua a libro ‘two books’, a noun phrase, with Dua ti libro ditoy. ‘There are two books here’, a quantitative clause. In the clause, ti marks the noun phrase following the numeral predicate; it does not replace the linker inside a counted phrase.

Numeral modifiers ordinarily precede their nouns. Medina/Pawley also recognizes reversed order in poetry. These examples use full numeral forms; the construction does not require learning numeral contractions.