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 plural of man is men. 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 suffices 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 can be explained by philological developments that affected one form of a word but not another. In such cases, the historical antecedents of the current forms once constituted a regular paradigm. Historical linguistics uses the term "suppletion"
to distinguish irregularities like person:people or cow:cattle that cannot be so explained because the parts of the paradigm have not evolved out of a single form. Hermann Osthoff coined the term "suppletion" in German in an 1899 study of the phenomenon in Indo-European languages.
Suppletion exists in more than 71 languages around the world. These languages are from various language families : Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Arabic, Romance, etc. For example, in Georgian, the paradigm for the verb "to come" is composed of four different roots. Similarly, in Modern Standard Arabic, the verb jāʾ usually uses the form taʿāl for its imperative, and the plural of marʾah is nisāʾ. Nonetheless, some of the more archaic Indo-European languages are particularly known for suppletion. Ancient Greek, for example, has some twenty verbs with suppletive paradigms, many with three separate roots.

Example words

To go

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. See Go .
The Romance languages have a variety of suppletive forms in conjugating the verb "to go", as these first-person singular forms illustrate:
The sources of these forms, numbered in the table, are four different Latin verbs:
  1. vadere,
  2. ire
  3. ambulare, or perhaps ambitare, itself a likely source for Spanish and Portuguese andar ;
  4. fui suppletive perfective of esse.
Many of the Romance languages use forms from different verbs in the present tense; for example, French has je vais from vadere, but nous allons from ambulare. Galician-Portuguese has a similar example: imos from ire and vamos from vadere ; the former is somewhat disused in modern Portuguese but very alive in modern Galician. Even ides, from itis second-person plural of ire, is the only form for "you go" both in Galician and Portuguese.
Similarly, the Welsh verb mynd has a variety of suppletive forms such as af and euthum. Irish téigh also has suppletive forms: dul and rachaidh.
In Estonian, the inflected forms of the verb minna were originally those of a verb cognate with the Finnish lähteä.

Good and bad

LanguageAdjectiveEtymologyComparative/superlativeEtymology
EnglishbadUncertain, possibly from OE bæddel, related to OE bædan < Proto-Germanic *baidijaną
In OE yfel was more common, cf Proto-Germanic *ubilaz, Gothic ubils, German übel Eng evil		worse / worstOE wyrsa, cognate to OHG wirsiro
Old Norse
Icelandic
Faroese
Norwegian
Swedish




verri / verstr
verri / verstur
verri / verstur
verre / verst
sämre, värre / sämst, värst
French
Portuguese
Spanish
Catalan
Italian		mal†
mau
malo
mal*
male†		Latin maluspire
pior
peor
pitjor
peggiore		Latin peior, cognate to Sanskrit padyate "he falls"
Scottish Gaelic
Irish
Welsh		droch
droch
drwg		Proto-Celtic *drukos < PIE *dʰrewgʰ- miosa
measa
gwaeth/gwaethaf		Proto-Celtic *missos < PIE *mey-

Proto-Celtic *waxtisamos
Polish
Czech
Slovak
Ukrainian
Serbo-Croatian		zły
zlý
zlý
archaic злий
zao		Proto-Slavic *zelgorszy / najgorszy
horší / nejhorší
horší / najhorší
гірший/ найгірший
gori / najgori		cf. Polish gorszyć
Russianплохой probably Proto-Slavic *polxхуже / худший Old Church Slavonic хоудъ, Proto-Slavic *хudъ

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".

Great and small

Celtic languages:
In many Slavic languages, great and small are suppletive:

Examples in languages

Albanian

In Albanian there are 14 irregular verbs divided into suppletive and non-suppletive:

Ancient Greek

had a large number of suppletive verbs. A few examples, listed by principal parts:

Bulgarian

In Bulgarian, the word chovek is suppletive. The strict plural form, chovetsi, is used only in Biblical context. In modern usage it has been replaced by the Greek loan khora. The counter form is suppletive as well: dushi. For example, dvama, trima dushi ; this form has no singular either.

English

In English, the complicated irregular verb to be has forms from several different roots:
This verb is suppletive in most Indo-European languages, as well as in some non-Indo-European languages such as Finnish.
An incomplete suppletion in English exists with the plural of person. The regular plural persons occurs mainly in legalistic use. The singular of the unrelated noun people is more commonly used in place of the plural; for example, "two people were living on a one-person salary". In its original sense of "ethnic group", people is itself a singular noun with regular plural peoples.

Irish

Several irregular Irish verbs are suppletive:
has several suppletive verbs. A few examples, listed by principal parts:

Polish

In some Slavic languages, a few verbs have imperfective and perfective forms arising from different roots. For example, in Polish:
VerbImperfectivePerfective
to takebraćwziąć
to saymówićpowiedzieć
to seewidziećzobaczyć
to watchoglądaćobejrzeć
to putkłaśćpołożyć
to findznajdowaćznaleźć
to go in/to go out wchodzić, wychodzićwejść, wyjść
to ride in/to ride out wjeżdżać, wyjeżdżaćwjechać, wyjechać

Note that z—, przy—, w—, and wy— are prefixes and are not part of the root
In Polish, the plural form of rok is lata which comes from the plural of lato. A similar suppletion occurs in god > let.

Romanian

The Romanian verb a fi is suppletive and irregular, with the infinitive coming from Latin fieri, but conjugated forms from forms of Latin sum. For example, eu sunt, tu ești, eu am fost, eu eram, eu fusei/fui ; while the subjunctive, also used to form the future in o să fiu, is linked to the infinitive.

Russian

In Russian, the word chelovek is suppletive. The strict plural form, cheloveki, is used only in Orthodox Church context. It may have originally been the unattested *cheloveky. In any case, in modern usage, it has been replaced by lyudi, the singular form of which is known in Russian only as a component of compound words. This suppletion also exists in Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene.

Generalizations

Strictly speaking, suppletion occurs when different inflections of a lexeme have etymologically unrelated stems. The term is also used in looser senses, albeit less formally.

Semantic relations

The term "suppletion" is also used in the looser sense when there is a semantic link between words but not an etymological one; unlike the strict inflectional sense, these may be in different lexical categories, such as noun/verb.
English noun/adjective pairs such as father/paternal or cow/bovine are also referred to as collateral adjectives. In this sense of the term, father/fatherly is non-suppletive. Fatherly is derived from father, while father/paternal is suppletive. Likewise cow/cowy is non-suppletive, while cow/bovine is suppletive.
In these cases, father/pater- and cow/bov- are cognate via Proto-Indo-European, but 'paternal' and 'bovine' are borrowings into English. The pairs are distantly etymologically related, but the words are not from a single Modern English stem.

Weak suppletion

The term "weak suppletion" is sometimes used in contemporary synchronic morphology in regard to sets of stems 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" is sometimes limited to reference to etymologically unrelated stems. Current usage of the term "weak suppletion" in synchronic morphology is not fixed.