Two accounts of traditional Mangarevan counting… and how to evaluate them

Among the traditional counting systems in Polynesian languages, those conveyed for Mangarevan provide particularly interesting and challenging cases. Accounting for their peculiarities presupposes accurate descriptions of their structure and key properties. Unfortunately, however, available descriptions are contradictory and partly incoherent. This paper attempts to resolve some of these contradictions by analysing and contrasting two accounts of Mangarevan counting and placing them in a cross-linguistic context.