Talk:Suppletion

message: I came to this page to understand why Swedish is the only language I know of that doesn't have an irregular inflection of "good". Instead it has both "god, godare, godast" and "bra, bättre, bäst". However, the article seems to say it isn't so. Not being native Swedish I don't wan to edit, but surely "god, bättre, bäst" is not correct/common Swedish?
:It isn't, and neither is "ond, värre, värst". This table, as it pertains to Swedish, is archaic at best. If edited, I would want it to include "dålig, sämre, sämst" which are the most "natural" words for "bad, worse, worst", but those of course would have different etymologies. Hattes (talk) 21:23, 22 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Swedish

message: Most domesticated land animals and their meat have a particularly rich set of non-cognate terms depending on age, sex, and castration. For instance: sheep, ram, ewe, wether, lamb, mutton. Do these numerous terms come under the category of suppletion? If not, where do they go? I am keen to see a table of such words, and create one if it doesn't exist, as it is a particularly striking feature of the English language. Is this phenomenon seen in other languages?
:Suppletion relates to inflection, which is a grammatical feature.  Animal names fall under Lexical gender rather than Grammatical gender. ("Gender" in the wide sense of "type", not just sex.) That said, English does have less lexical gender (as well as less grammatical gender) than most other Indo-European languages.  Regarding the list,  Wikipedia is not a dictionary but have fun with the Animals list in Wiktionary. jnestorius(talk) 14:17, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Domesticated Land Animals 

message: I have removed the following section:
::Morphemes themselves can also be suppletive. In English, the plural suffix -en which occurs in oxen is used in lieu of the more regular suffix -(e)s. In Seri, the infinitive prefix has two suppletive forms: ica- with intransitive verbs and iha- (plus change in the vowel under certain conditions) with transitive verbs. Also in Seri, the passive prefix has two suppletive forms: p- (plus change in the vowel under certain conditions) before vowel-initial roots, and ah- elsewhere. The imperative prefix in Seri has more than one suppletive allomorph; omitting some details, these suppletive allomorphs include c- in negative imperatives, c- when followed by a root that begins with a short low vowel, null plus a vowel change before an intransitive verb that begins with a non-low vowel, and h- elsewhere. The verb meaning 'arrive' has two suppletive stems:  -afp when the subject is singular and -azcam when the subject is plural. The noun for 'thing' has two suppletive forms: ziix means 'thing' and xiica is the plural. Seri person is cmiique and the plural is  comcaac.
I don't think "suppletive" is being used in the same way here.  (I may be misinterpreting the above paragraph: in which case, by all means reinstate it, but try to make it clearer: I don't see how it qualifies as "suppletion" in the sense used in the article.) "Suppletion" can be defined:
*narrowly, as in this article, to mean use of an unrelated form as an inflection. Used in historical linguistics and philology As in:
:*
:*
*more broadly to mean anything that language students would call "irregular".  Used in synchronic theoretical morphology.  As in:
:*
:*
Someone with access to the following might fill this in better:
*
*
*
Probably the article should distinguish between the broad/weak and narrow/strong senses, but I think it should concentrate on the latter. jnestorius(talk) 21:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Weak suppletion 

message: The column labeled "Comparative/Superlative" contains mixed information, so that it is not clear (to one, like me, who is unfamiliar with these languages) whether the words in the rows for Romance languages are comparatives or superlatives. I suspect someone expanded an existing table without amending the label or the structure. Perhaps this column should be broken into two, yes? fuper (talk) 15:54, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the same word is both comparative and superlative depending on the construction.  The multiple words are for the multiple languages. I'm unsure how this might be conveyed more clearly.  --jnestorius(talk) 20:04, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table of Comparatives/Superlatives 

message: Well, despite what I said about duine/daoine over at Talk:Weak suppletion, I'm commenting it out here because I can't find sources that confirm that the version I heard (that "duine" comes from *ghdhm-yo- from *ghdhem- "earth", while "daoine" comes from *dhewenyo- from *dhew- "die") is in fact the standard view. I believe it is the standard view, but in the sources available to me at the moment, all I can find is (1) people deriving "duine" from *ghdhm-yo- with no mention of daoine, (2) people deriving "duine" from *ghdhm-yo- and daoine from *ghdhoim-o- (cf. Latin hūmānus < *(dh)ghoim-), and (3) people deriving duine from zero grade *du-n-yo- and daoine from e-grade *deu-enyo-. But I can't find a source that comes and and says directly what I learned in graduate school, name that for all their surface similarity, the two forms are etymologically unrelated. —Angr 18:11, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duine/daoine 

message: These pronunciation guides appear to be a confusing combination of IPA and intuitive English transliteration... 
/'luchshij/nai'luchshij/
/'hudshij/nai'hudshij/
I've edited them a bit so that they conform better to IPA but I'm not really an expert in this domain. Kasnie (talk) 03:56, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Russian examples 

message: This section of Examples has been bodged, and will need to be fixed. Five sources are numbered within the table, but only four are listed underneath. In the table French "allai" is given as "3 or 4", and Spanish "fui" as "5", but in the list #4 is Latin "fui", which clearly applies to Spanish "fui" not "allai", and there is no list #5. It looks like there have been two different models of sources, and one has been changed to the other but not completely - probably from five to four, the older #4 being removed and #5 moved up.
If "allai" does not come from "ambulare" it may come from the same source as Italian "andare" according to Wiktionary - namely a combination of "vadere" and "aditare". Altho where the N comes from is still a mystery. But I would have thought the French forms with their L's are much more certain derivations from "ambulare" than Spanish "andar" or Italian "andare/andrò/andai etc.". There is no accounting for the ND there.
But it might help to find some linguistics sources making it all clear?
86.0.169.202 (talk) 12:19, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The Online Etymology Dictionary says that Italian andare and Spanish andar are from Vulgar Latin ambitare, which I suppose is a frequentative of ambire. Phonologically, it's plausible as ambitare > ambidare > ambdare > andare. I don't know where Wiktionary gets its etymology of andare. I've just changed Wiktionary's etymologies of both andare and andar to reflect the Online Etym. Dict.'s etymology. It may not be right, but at least it's sourced. —Angr 16:55, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin sources for Romance "go" 

message: I don't believe the English convention of using people as the plural of person is an example of suppletion in the sense used in this article, since each of those words has the full, regular set of inflectional forms: person, person’s, persons, persons’, people, people’s, peoples, peoples’. Rather, this is an instance of a usage convention and unrelated to inflectional morphology except as it may provide an example of how suppletion occurs. Grosbach (talk) 23:52, 18 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That doesn’t matter. Many people say one person, two people, three people, which clearly shows suppletion. Two persons is literary. Peoples is a plural meaning “ethnic groups”. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 13:46, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Person—People