Suppletion

In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies that a gap in the paradigm was filled by a form "supplied" by a different paradigm. Instances of suppletion are overwhelmingly restricted to the most commonly-used lexical items in a language.

Irregularity and suppletion

An irregular paradigm is one in which the derived forms of a word cannot be deduced by simple rules from the base form. For example, someone who knows only a little English can deduce that the plural of girl is girls, but cannot deduce that the plurals of man and person are men and people. Language learners are often most aware of irregular verbs, but any part of speech with inflections can be irregular. For most synchronic purposes — first language acquisition studies, psycholinguistics, language teaching theory — it is enough to note that these forms are irregular. However historical linguistics seeks to explain how they came to be so and distinguishes different kinds of irregularity according to their origins. Most irregular paradigms (like man:men) can be explained by philological developments which affected one form of a word but not another. The historical antecedents of the current forms were once a regular paradigm. The term "suppletion" was coined by historical linguists to distinguish irregularities like person:people which cannot be so explained, because the parts of the paradigm have not evolved out of a single form.

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.) See go (verb).

• 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 (4)

The sources of these are 4 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. 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).

• Similarly, the Welsh verb mynd (to go) has a variety of suppletive forms such as af, "I shall go" and euthum, "I went".

• In Germanic, Romance, Celtic and Slavic languages, the comparative and superlative of the adjective "good" is suppletive; in many of these languages the adjective "bad" is also suppletive.

good, better, best

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"
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"
Polish Czech Slovak	dobry dobrý dobrý	Proto-Slavic *dobrъ	lepszy / najlepszy lepší / nejlepší lepší / najlepší	PIE *lep- / *lēp- ("nice" or "good")
Russian	хороший (/xʌ'roʂɨj/)	probably from Proto-Slavic *xorb	лучший / наилучший (/'lutʂʂij/, /nai̯'lutʂʂij/)	Old Russian лучии, neut. луче, Old Church Slavonic лоучии "more suitable, appropriate"

bad, worse, worst

Language	Adjective	Etymology	Comparative/superlative	Etymology
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	mauvais malo male†	Latin malus	pire peor peggiore	Latin pejor, cognate to Sanskrit padyate "he falls"
Polish Czech Slovak	zły zlý (špatný) zlý	Proto-Slavic *zel	gorszy / najgorszy horší / nejhorší horší / najhorší
Russian	плохой (/plo'hoj/)	probably Proto-Slavic *polx	худший / наихудший (/'hudʂij/, /nai̯'hudʂij/)	Old Church Slavonic хоудъ, Proto-Slavic *хudъ ("bad", "small")

† 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."

• In English, the complicated irregular verb be / is / were has forms from several different roots: be originally comes from the Proto-Indo-European language *bhu-; am, is and are from *es-, and was and were from *wes-. This verb is suppletive in most IE languages. See Indo-European copula.

• 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.

• In Russian, the word человек chelovek (man, human being) is suppletive. The strict plural form, человеки cheloveki, is used only in Orthodox Church context. It may have originally been *человекы but this is not attested. In any case, in modern usage it has been replaced by люди ljudi, the singular form of which is known in Russian only as a component of compound words (such as простолюдин prostoljudin). This suppletion also exists in Polish (człowiek > ludzie), Czech (člověk > lidé), and Slovene (človek > ljudje).

• In Bulgarian, the word човек chovek (man, human being) is suppletive. The strict plural form, човеци chovetsi, is used only in Biblical context. In modern usage it has been replaced by the Greek loan хора xora. The counter form (special form for masculine nouns, used after numerals) is suppletive as well: души dùshi (with the accent on the first syllable), e.g. двама, трима души (two, three people). This form has no singular either (a related but different noun is the plural души dushì, with the accent at the last syllable, singular душа dushà (soul).

• In Polish, the plural form of rok ("year") is lata which comes from the plural of lato ("summer").

• In many Slavic languages, small and big are suppletive:

small, smaller, smallest

Language	Adjective	Comparative / superlative
Polish	mały	mniejszy / najmniejszy
Czech	malý	menší / nejmenší

big, bigger, biggest

Language	Adjective	Comparative / superlative
Polish	duży	większy / największy
Czech	velký	větší / největší

• In some Slavic languages, a few verbs have imperfective and perfective forms arising from different roots. For example, in Polish:

Verb	Imperfective	Perfective
to take	brać	wziąć
to say	mówić	powiedzieć
to see	widzieć	zobaczyć
to watch	oglądać	obejrzeć
to put	kłaść	położyć
to find	znajdować	znaleźć
to accept	przyjmować	przyjąć
to enter / to leave (on foot)	wchodzić / wychodzić	wejść / wyjść
to enter / to leave (by car)	wjeżdżać / wyjeżdżać	wjechać / wyjechać

^ * z, przy, w, and wy are prefixes and are not part of the root

Weak suppletion

The term “weak suppletion” is sometimes used in contemporary synchronic morphology in regard to sets of stems (or affixes) whose alternations cannot be accounted for by current phonological rules. For example, stems in the word pair oblige/obligate are related by meaning but the stem-final alternation is not related by any synchronic phonological process. This makes the pair appear to be suppletive, except that they are related etymologically. In historical linguistics suppletion only refers to etymologically unrelated stems. Current usage of the term “weak suppletion” in synchronic morphology is not fixed.

External links

• Surrey Suppletion Database – examples of suppletion in different languages

See also

• Irregular verb