Dinka (Nilotic, South Sudan) has been cited as a challenge for item-based
approaches to morphology, since its inflectional system is primarily
expressed through changes to the root (e.g. Aronoff & Fudeman 2011:54;
Inkelas 2014:72; Arkadiev & Klamer 2018:450), apparently including
lengthening, shortening, raising, lowering, as well as alternations in
voice and tone. These changes frequently do and do not co-occur,
potentially requiring a multitude of autosegmental affixes.This talk
demonstrates that Dinka number morphology is nonetheless concatenative and
regular, with all roots combining with a single floating affix drawn from a
small inventory. First, Dinka is synchronically a tripartite number system,
contra Andersen (2014). Applying insights from Andersen (1993, 2017) on
vowel grades and Gjersøe (2020) on tone in Nuer, we argue that Dinka nouns
can be sorted into three number classes, each with three conjugation
classes, within which number exponents are predictable.