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 (like man:men) can be explained by philological developments that affected one form of a word but not another (in this case, Germanic umlaut). In other cases, the historical antecedents of the current forms once constituted a regular paradigm. Historical linguists adopted 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.
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 (di- / -val- / -vid- / -sul-). Similarly, in Modern Standard Arabic, the verb jāʾ "come" usually uses the form taʿāl for its imperative, and the plural of marʾah "woman" is nisāʾ. Nonetheless, some of the more archaic Indo-European languages are particularly known for suppletion. Ancient Greek, for example, has some 20 verbs with suppletive paradigms, many with 3 separate roots. (See Ancient Greek verbs § Suppletive verbs.)
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:
The sources of these forms are four different Latin verbs:
- vadere "to advance", akin to English wade, wend (see above), and wander and to German wander[e]n
- ire "to go"
- ambulare "to walk", or in some cases perhaps ambitare "to go around", the latter itself generated through redundant rule application by appending Latin regular first-conjugation -are to the third-person singular of ire as prefixed by amb- ("[on] both [sides]"); Spanish and Portuguese andar "to walk" have the same source
- fui suppletive perfective of esse "to be". (The preterites of "to be" and "to go" are identical in Spanish and Portuguese. Compare the English construction "Have you been to France?" which has no simple present form.)
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). Galician-Portuguese has a similar example:
imos (from
ire, "to go") and
vamos (from
vadere), "we go", 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 (plural) go" both in Galician and Portuguese (Spanish
vais, from
vadere).
Similarly, the Welsh verb mynd (to go) has a variety of suppletive forms such as af, "I shall go" and euthum, "we went".
The Romanian verb a fi ("to be") is suppletive and irregular, with the infinitive coming from Latin fieri, but conjugated forms from forms of Latin sum; e.g. eu sunt, "I am", tu ești "You are", eu am fost "I have been", eu eram, "I used to be", eu fusei/fui "I was", while the subjunctive, also used to form the future in o să fiu, "I will be/am going to be", is linked to the infinitive.
In Albanian there are 14 irregular verbs divided into suppletive and non-suppletive:
In Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages, the comparative and superlative of the adjective "good" is suppletive; in many of these languages the adjective "bad" is also suppletive.
† These are adverbial forms ("badly"); the Italian adjective is itself suppletive (cattivo, from the same root as "captive", respectively) whereas the French mauvais is compound (latin malifātius < malus+fatum).
* Mal is used in Catalan before nouns, the form after nouns (dolent) is also suppletive (< Latin dolente "painful").
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-. See Indo-European copula. This verb is suppletive in most IE languages, as well as in some non-IE languages such as Finnish.
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 the unattested *человекы *cheloveky. In any case, in modern usage, it has been replaced by люди lyudi, the singular form of which is known in Russian only as a component of compound words (such as простолюдин prostolyudin). This suppletion also exists in Polish (człowiek > ludzie), Czech (člověk > lidé), Serbo-Croatian (čovjek > ljudi), 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 khora. The counter form (special form for masculine nouns, used after numerals) is suppletive as well: души dushi (with the accent on the first syllable), e.g. двама, трима души dvama, trima dushi (two, three people). This form has no singular either (a related but different noun is the plural души dushi, singular душа dusha (soul), both with accent on the last syllable).
In Polish, the plural form of rok ("year") is lata which comes from the plural of lato ("summer"). A similar suppletion occurs in Russian: год god ("year") > лет let (genitive of "years").
In many Slavic languages, small and great are suppletive:
In some Slavic languages, a few verbs have imperfective and perfective forms arising from different roots. For example, in Polish:
^ *z, przy, w, and wy are prefixes and are not part of the root
Ancient Greek had a large number of suppletive verbs. (See Ancient Greek verbs#Suppletive verbs.) A few examples, listed by principal parts:
erkhomai, eîmi/eleusomai, ēlthon, elēlutha, --, -- "go, come".
legō, eraō (erô) / leksō, eipon / eleksa, eirēka, eirēmai / lelegmai, elekhthēn / errhēthēn "say, speak".
horaō, opsomai, eidon, heorāka / heōrāka, heōrāmai / ōmmai, ōphthēn "see".
pherō, oisō, ēnegka / ēnegkon, enēnokha, enēnegmai, ēnekhthēn "carry".
pōleō, apodōsomai, apedomēn, peprāka, peprāmai, eprāthēn "sell".
The comparison of good is also suppletive in Finnish (hyvä → parempi).
In Estonian, the inflected forms of the verb minna (to go) were originally those of a verb cognate with the Finnish lähteä (to leave).
Strictly speaking, suppletion occurs when different inflections of a lexeme (i.e., with the same lexical category) have etymologically unrelated stems. The term is also used in looser senses, albeit less formally.
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 (via Old French and Latin). The pairs are distantly etymologically related, but the words are not from a single Modern English stem.
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" is sometimes limited to reference to etymologically unrelated stems. Current usage of the term "weak suppletion" in synchronic morphology is not fixed.
