Suppletion

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In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. Instances of suppletion in a particular language are overwhelmingly restricted to its most commonly-used lexical items. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular".

Here are some examples:

  • In English, the past tense of the verb go is went, which comes from the past tense of the verb wend, archaic in this sense. (The modern past tense of wend is wended.) There is also a suppletive use of the perfect tense of be to distinguish an experiential sense ("He has been to France") from a resultative sense ("He has gone to France").
  • The Romance languages have a variety of suppletive forms in conjugating the verb "to go", as these first-person singular forms illustrate:
Language Present Future Preterite
French vais (1) irai (2) allai (3 or 4)
Italian vado (1) andrò (3) andai (3)
Spanish voy (1) iré (2) fui (5)
The sources of these are 5 different Latin verbs:
  1. vadere "to advance"
  2. ire "to go"
  3. ambulare "to walk" (sometimes claimed to be the source of Spanish andar "to walk")
  4. allatus suppletive participle of auferre "to carry"
  5. fui suppletive perfective of esse "to be" (the preterites of "to be" and "to go" are identical in Spanish).
Many of the Romance languages use forms from different verbs in the present tense; for example, French has je vais, "I go", (from vadere) but nous allons "we go", (from ambulare).
Language Adjective Etymology Comparative/superlative Etymology
English;
German		 good; gut OE gōd, cognate to OHG guot, Sanskrit gadhya "what one clings to" better/best; besser/am besten OE betera, cognate to bōt "remedy", Sanskrit bhadra "fortunate"
English bad unknown
In OE yfel were more common, cf Proto-Germanic *ubilaz, Gothic ubils (bad), German übel (evil/bad) Eng evil		 worse/worst OE wyrsa, cognate to OHG wirsiro
French;
Spanish;
Italian		 bon; bueno; buono Latin bonus, from OL duenos, cognate to Sanskrit duva "reverence" meilleur; mejor; migliore Latin melior, cognate to multus "many", Gk mala "very"
mauvais; malo; male† Latin malus pire; peor; peggiore Latin pejor, cognate to Sanskrit padyate "he falls"
† This is an adverbial form ("badly"); the Italian adjective is itself suppletive (cattivo, from the same root as "captive").
  • Similarly to the Italian noted above, the English adverb form of "good" is the unrelated word "well," from Old English wel, cognate to wyllan "to wish."
  • An incomplete suppletion in English exists with the plural of person (from the Latin persona). The regular plural persons occurs mainly in legalistic use. The singular of the unrelated noun people (from Latin populus) is more commonly used in place of the plural, e.g. "two people were living on a one-person salary" (note the plural verb). In its original sense of "ethnic group", people is itself a singular noun with regular plural peoples.
  • Morphemes themselves can also be suppletive. In English, the plural suffix -en which occurs in oxen is used in lieu of the more regular suffix -(e)s. In Seri, the infinitive prefix has two suppletive forms: ica- with intransitive verbs and iha- (plus change in the vowel under certain conditions) with intransitive verbs. Also in Seri, the passive prefix has two suppletive forms: p- (plus change in the vowel under certain conditions) before vowel-initial roots, and ah- elsewhere. The imperative prefix in Seri has more than one suppletive allomorph; omitting some details, these suppletive allomorphs include c- in negative imperatives, c- when followed by a root that begins with a short low vowel, null plus a vowel change before an intransitive verb that begins with a non-low vowel, and h- elsewhere. The verb meaning 'arrive' has two suppletive stems: -afp when the subject is singular and -azcam when the subject is plural. The noun for 'thing' has two suppletive forms: ziix means 'thing' and xiica is the plural. Seri person is cmiique and the plural is comcaac.
  • In Russian, the word человек chelovek (man, human being) is suppletive. The strict plural form, человекы cheloveky, is almost never used. In modern usage it has been replaced by люди ljodi, the singular form of which is known in Russian only as a component of compound words (such as простолюдина prostoljodina). (This supletion exists also in Polish and Czech languages)
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