Editing Suppletion (section)

==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 verb]]s, 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 phonological developments that affected one form of a word but not another (in this case, [[Germanic umlaut]]). In such cases, the historical antecedents of the current forms once constituted a regular paradigm.

Historical linguistics uses the term "suppletion"<ref>
{{OED | suppletion}}
</ref>
to distinguish irregularities like ''person:people'' or ''[[cattle|cow:cattle]]'' that cannot be so explained because the parts of the paradigm have not evolved out of a single form.

[[Hermann Osthoff]] coined the term "suppletion" in German in an 1899 study of the phenomenon in [[Indo-European languages]].<ref>{{cite book|last=Osthoff |first=Hermann|title=Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen : erweiterte akademische Rede ; akademische Rede zur Feier des Geburtsfestes des höchstseligen Grossherzogs Karl Friedrich am 22. November 1899|url=http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN667016694&PHYSID=PHYS_0001&DMDID=|year=1900|publisher=Wolff|location=Heidelberg |language=de}}</ref><ref name="Bobaljik2012">{{cite book|last=Bobaljik|first=Jonathan David|title=Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=693xCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA27|access-date=5 December 2017|date=2012-10-05|publisher=MIT Press|isbn=9780262304597|page=27}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://blog.oup.com/2013/01/why-is-the-past-tense-of-go-went-suppletion/|title=How come the past of 'go' is 'went?'|last=Liberman|first=Anatoly|date=9 Jan 2013|work=Oxford Etymologist|publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]|access-date=5 December 2017}}</ref>

Suppletion exists in many languages around the world.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Suppletion: Typology, markedness, complexity|last=Greville G|first=Corbett|publisher=On Inflection. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter|year=2009|location=Berlin|pages=25–40}}</ref> These  languages are from various language families: [[Indo-Aryan languages|Indo-Aryan]],  [[Dravidian languages|Dravidian]], [[Semitic languages|Semitic]], [[Romance languages|Romance]], etc.

For example, in [[Georgian language|Georgian]], the paradigm for the verb "to come" is composed of four different roots ({{Lang|ka-Latn|mi-}}, {{Lang|ka-Latn|-val-}}, {{Lang|ka-Latn|-vid-}}, and {{Lang|ka-Latn|-sul-}}; {{lang|ka|მი-}}, {{lang|ka|-ვალ-}}, {{lang|ka|-ვიდ-}}, {{lang|ka|-სულ-}}).<ref>Andrew Hippisley, Marina Chumakina, Greville G. Corbett and Dunstan Brown. ''Suppletion: Frequency, Categories and Distribution of Stems''. University of Surrey.[http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/2229/]</ref>

Similarly, in [[Modern Standard Arabic]], the verb ''{{Transliteration|ar|jāʾ}}'' ('come') usually uses the form ''{{Transliteration|ar|taʿāl}}'' for its imperative, and the plural of ''{{Transliteration|ar|marʾah}}'' ('woman') is ''{{Transliteration|ar|nisāʾ}}''.

Some of the more archaic Indo-European languages are particularly known for suppletion. [[Ancient Greek]], for example, has some [[Ancient Greek verbs#Verbs using more than one stem|twenty verbs with suppletive paradigms]], many with three separate roots.