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. Suppletion in a particular language, as demonstrated below, occurs overwhelmingly in lexical items which arise particularly often. Many suppletive forms are known to learners of languages simply as 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 afferre "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 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."
  • In English, the complicated irregular verb be / is / were has forms from several different roots: be originally comes from Indo-European *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.de:Suppletion
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