Does this really count as suppletion or is it just an idiom? If we allow this, we have to count French monde as a suppletive plural of personne, as in combien de monde? "how many people?" and beaucoup de monde "lots of people". (Although the case for gens as suppletive plural of personne is fairly strong, so why not allow another one?)Mecislau wrote:Народ (lit. "nation") is often used as a collective plural (сколько народа здесь! "(look) how many people are here!", сколько народу живет в этом городе? "how many people live in this city?")
I'm very skeptical about this idea. If we allow "suppletive derivational morphology", we're going to find it absolutely everywhere. See/vision, hear/auditory, steal/thief, elect/democracy... the list could go on ad infinitum. None of this is a surprising find, and is better explained by calling it "a non-derived lexeme for a related concept".Mecislau wrote:Either way, it can still be considered suppletive. It's just suppletive derivational morphology rather than inflectional morphology.Piotr wrote:That's if you consider the Slavic perfective/imperfective system to be inflection rather than derivation, IMO it's somewhere in between the two. "Suppletion" is mostly applicable to what's considered to be inflection, isn't it? - the division being admittedly a little fuzzy.
The difference is that you don't get paradigms of derivational morphology – there doesn't have to be a derived noun for every verb meaning "person to whom X is done" or whatever. But there does (except with rare defective verbs) have to be e.g. a third person singular indicative form of each verb (assuming the language has this category). This is because inflectional morphology works with paradigms: there's a slot to be filled, so something has to fill it. When what fills it is not cognate with the other forms in the paradigm, we have suppletion.
All this is without prejudice to whether the Russian imperfective verb forms are inflection or not .