tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Nov 02 17:14:20 1995

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Re: Suppletion

Jarno Peschier wrote:

>I just translated this litterally from Dutch: "Wat was was voor was was
>was? Voor was was was, was was is."   ;-)

   I don't read Dutch, but, if I get the drift of your quote in that
language,  the forms "is" and "was" exist in the Dutch verb "to be."  I
would think it probable that the older Germanic verbs from which the
English verb "to be" is derived were the sources of the Dutch verb "to be"
as well.  In which case you could translate my comment into Dutch and it
would be applicable.  (I, unfortunately couldn't translate anything into Dutch.)

>What's suppletion exactly anyway...?

    Suppletion is a process by which new declensions, conjugations etc. are
formed from two or more earlier vocabulary items.  An example in English
would be the adjective "good."  The comparative of "good," in Modern
English, is "better" and the superlative is "best."  "Better" and "best,"
however, are actually descended from the comparative and superlative forms
of a word "bhad" in Indo-European which meant "good."  The form "good"
itself, in earlier forms of English, meant something like "fitting."
People started using the ancestral forms of "better" and "best" as forms of
"good" and abandoned, somewhere along the way, the form "bhad."
Incidentally, this fronting of the /a/ in "bhad" to the /E/ in "better" is
an example of umlaut in English.   Most English speakers will tell you
there's no such thing. {G}

    In Modern English, "be," "been" and "being" come from one ancient verb;
 "am." "is" and "are" from another; and "was" and "were" from a third.  All
three had slightly different meanings and all three still existed as
separate verbs in the earliest part of the history of the English language.
 Native speakers of English, over a period of time, gradually abandoned
certain forms, making all three defective, and the remainder is thought of
as a single verb in modern times.  The corresponding Dutch verb(s) probably
had a similar history, since Dutch is derived from much the same IE roots
as English.


Jej'QIb wrote:

> 'Was' is past tense of 'to be' and 'is' is present tense of 'to be', so
>Jarno's line should IMHO be correct.

    Jarno's line is indeed correct if you limit your thinking to the
synchronic.   I was merely pointing out that diachronically the two forms
do not derive from one another.  As I mentioned above, the same thing
probably happened in the history of the Dutch language.  Scarcely a fault.

    I think we have done suppletion to death, but no one has answered my
original question.  Is there suppletion in tlhIngan?  Do native speakers of
tlhIngan regard, for example,  "cha" as the plural of "peng" or as a
separate vocabulary item?

     Paul

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