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Post your favourite examples of suppletion here.




Non-IE languages especially welcome.

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Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

Japanese has ii "good", which comes from an earlier form yoi which is still used for conjugation, so:

ii "is good"
yokatta "was good"
yonai "is not good"
yonakatta "was not good"

though not sure if that really counts

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scientists have discovered a capsule that makes you not a gullible fucktard!

Swedish has:

liten 'small (sg)'
små 'small (pl)'
mindre 'smaller'

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Attention, je pelote !

Let's not forget emotive conjugation

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Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

The verb "to be" has suppletion in many, many languages, IE and not.

In my native, Uralic, Hungarian the infinitive is lenni, from which are also formed the future leszek, leszel, lesz etc. and the imperative légy, legyetek. Other forms are from another stem altogether, beginning with v-: Present vagyok, vagy, van etc.; Past voltam, voltál, volt etc. Curiously, the conditional can use either stem: lennék, lennél, lenne etc. or volnék, volnál, volna etc.

The Romance languages do the same, with at least two, but more likely three stems. (e.g. French infinitive être, present ind. 1st pers sing. suis, preterite (becoming obsolete) fus. ) The first and second stems may be related etymologically, but this is hardly evident to the naive observer. Italian follows the same pattern, and introduces a fourth stem stato for the past participle. The Iberian languages follow the French pattern, but the infinitive ser is from a 4th root (Latin sedere) originally, although on the surface it looks as if it belonged with somos - son/são.

Seeing that we are all English speakers here, I don't have to elaborate on the suppletion of the verb "to be" in Germanic languages.

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The verb "to go" also has suppletion in many languages, including English go/went. The Romance languages routinely merge the derivatives of Latin ire and vadere, to which French adds the derivatives of ambulare, Italian the derivatives of ambitare and Spanish/Portuguese merges in the equivalent of the preterite/pluperfect/past subjunctive of "to be" (i.e. Portuguese foi can mean both "he was" and "he went").

Hungarian jönni 'to come' has the suppletive imperative gyere.

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Japanese widely uses suppletion for polite and highly formal verbal forms, with a complexity that I will simply not enter into here.

Actually, Paul Krugman had one of these just the other day on his blog: I invest, you speculate, he throws his money away.

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Or "I am for liberty, you are a faction", from a book on the Roman Empire.

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What's the third person? "He is a terrorist"?

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Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

It doesn't say, but probably, yes.

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Yimas:
"son": kalakn
"two sons": kaymampan
"sons" [more than two]: kumpwi

Angoram:
"father": apa
"fathers": anont

Suppletion, particularly for number, but also for tense, mood and person, is very widespread in New Guinea. Some languages have suppletion agreement, as it were: a plural object not only has its own suppletive form, but triggers a suppletive form of the verb as well. Iirc, Angoram has lunatic suppletion at times, but I could be confusing it with another language of a similar name - sadly, can't find the details this time.

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Seri:
cap "the (standing) (sg.)"
coyolca "the (standing) (pl.)"

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

The Wikipedia article used Polish as its example for imperfective/perfective pairs Slavic languages. Here are a few common examples from Russian:

[imperfective / perfective - translation]

говорить / сказать - to speak/say
ловить / поймать - to catch
брать / взять - to take
класть / положить - to put/place

For nouns, there is:
ребёнок / дети - child, children

The plural form ребята exists but it is a casual word that can be translated as "guys", regardless of the age. There is also a singular form дитя, but it is archaic. The odd thing about дитя is that it is a Russian word that's neuter but ends in -я in the singular. I don't know any others.

It doesn't count. It's just the result of irregular sound change. This is suppletion though: the negative of aru (to be) is the adjective nai (non-existant), rather than the expected **aranai. Conversely, the polite form of nai is (usually) arimasen, but nai desu is increasingly common.

Honorific forms of certain verbs are suppletive - the humble form of iu (to say) is mōsu, rather than **o-ii-suru, the honorific form of taberu (to eat) is meshiagaru rather than **o-tabe-ni naru.

More examples are found in the numeral system: hito-ri, futa-ri, san-nin, yo-nin, go-nin...; tsuitachi, futsu-ka, mik-ka, yok-ka, itsu-ka, ..., tō-ka, jūichi-nichi, jūni-nichi, ...; is-sai, ni-sai, ..., jūkyū-sai, hatachi, nijūis-sai...

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書不盡言、言不盡意

I could see that happening in English, or indeed any language, as eating is so bound up with manners. My inferiors might scoff or chow down while my superiors dine. French manger vs. bouffer might be a better example.


I'm afraid this means nothing to me. Can we please have a gloss?


I've just looked at the wikipedia article, and the definite articles for seated objects are even better.

_________________
Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.
—Stephen R. Anderson

Málin eru höfuðeinkenni þjóðanna.
—Séra Tómas Sæmundsson

"Have you noticed that their stuff is 'shit' and your shit is 'stuff'?" - George Carlin

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<Anaxandridas> How many artists do you know get paid?
<Anaxandridas> Seriously, name five.

The first set are count people. It's actually the composite of two regular series - one native (the ones ending in -ri, 1-2) and the other Sino-Japonic. The second set are days of the month - again, there is a native series (the ones ending in -ka, 2-10), a Sino-Japonic series (the ones ending in -nichi, 11-31) and a truly irregular one - tsuitachi - which means something like new moon. The last set is for your age - there's only one series (Sino-Japonic) with a retention of the native word for 20.

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書不盡言、言不盡意

The Mayan languages tend to have a few nouns that are suppletive when possessed. In K'ichee', the regular pattern looks like ooj "avocado," w-ooj "my avocado," aw-ooj "your avocado".... — but then you get jaa "house" with w-o'ch "my house," aw-o'ch "your house," and so on.

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"When I was about 16 it occurred to me that conlanging might be a sin, but I changed my mind when I realized Adam and Eve were doing it before the Fall." —Mercator

The English copula is insanely supplentive, but everyone knows that already.

There are 4 separate roots:

*h1es-mi > am
*h1es-ti > is

*buH- "to become" > be

*wes- "to live" > was, were

*h1er- "to move" > are, art (borrowed from Old Norse)

Actually, Old Norse vera and er were earlier vesa and es, which makes it unlikely that er was linked to a separate Indo-European root *h1er. Yes, I have seen that argued myself but that seems unlikely in that light, likely being argued on the basis of only classical Old Icelandic combined with a very Neogrammarian view of sound change without any basis in earlier Old Norse or Proto-Norse.

Watashi wa meshiageru, kimi wa taberu, kare wa kuu?

Bah, I can't think of any really interesting ones. The best one I can come up with is the Slovene "to go":

infinitive: iti
1st person singular masculine present: grem
participle: šel

And even iti and šel [S@u_^] actually seem to be related IIRC.

človek [tSlOv@k] (sg.) - ljudje [ljud"je] (pl.) for "human being" is another one.

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High Eolic (PDF)

O_o I'm pretty sure you would never use meshiagaru when referring to yourself.

Sensei wa meshiagaru, watashi wa taberu.

However, I don't actually know what I'm talking about. Keigo is wonky.

Suppletion makes me hot

I thought - read somewhere I believe - that *šьdlъ was related to *xoditi (though I don't grasp the ablaut going on here fully, ь?), which seems unrelated to *jьti at the PIE level. Of course suppletion always remains a little relative, as we're unable to track all the roots to Proto-World in order to make sure they're unrelated in the absolute sense. This becomes particularly evident if one's trying to use the term in reference to some exotic language isolate, e.g. Kusunda.



This seems to be the case in almost every Slavic language (apparently Bulgarian is an exception, as they've replaced the latter form with something weird, and човеци is possible too* ).

*strictly speaking e.g. człowieki is possible in Polish, but only jocularly; the same with sg ludź



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.



Isn't say имя neuter? That's the regular reflex of PSl. *-ę of the neuter en- and -ent-stems.



This reminds me of the Polish irregular adjective gradation: chory - chorszy - trup

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Yes, that is the general consensus. And what's wrong with the ablaut? You see ь~o elsewhere in Slavic as well (cf. *bьrati, *bor)



Russian is actually far more complicated in this respect. Человек could be said to have three different plurals in common usage.

Люди, of course, is the most common one.

Человек is sometimes used as the genitive plural of человек (yes, the same word), instead of the more typical людей, after numbers.

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?")



Either way, it can still be considered suppletive. It's just suppletive derivational morphology rather than inflectional morphology.



Well, of -en- stems, yes. Russian имя, племя, семя, etc, are all neuter.

-ent- stems, however, become masculine though suffixation (*telę "calf" > телёнок) in the singular; in the plural Russian gender distinctions are neutralized anyways.






Georgian has some really good suppletive forms. I'll have to look this one up (I don't use it very often), but some verbs have suppletive forms depending on the person of the indirect object (ie, one form for no indirect object, one for 1st or 2nd person indirect object, and one for 3rd person indirect object). Oy.

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http://www.veche.net/
http://www.veche.net/novegradian - Grammar of Novegradian
http://www.veche.net/alashian - Grammar of Alashian