tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Oct 31 11:25:59 1995

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Re: Suppletion

>Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 01:33:25 -0800
>From: Jarno Peschier <[email protected]>

>[Quoting MR PAUL J COFFEY]
>> 
>> Jarno Peschier wrote:
>> >What was was, before was was was? Before was was was, was was is.
>>      Cute!  I liked it.  But the Modern English verb "to be" is the result
>> of suppletion. "is" and "was" come from different verbs.  One might say
>> "was" never was "is." {G}

>How was I supposed to know that (English not being my natural language
>and not being an (English language) linguist)? I just translated this
>litterally from Dutch: "Wat was was voor was was was? Voor was was
>was, was was is."   ;-)

I think Dutch had the same suppletion as English (since it happened fairly
early in the development of European languages), as you can see by the way
"was" and "is" are cognates in the two languages.

Not that I can see that this in any way makes what Jarno said incorrect or
less delightful to listen to tripping off the tongue or to think about...

My theory as to the suppletion: this is not researched, and I don't think
this is an open problem; somewhere out there I believe the answer is pretty
well-accepted, I just never bothered to look it up.  This one is based on
my own limited knowledge and a footnote or two about this development in a
textbook, and might be right anyway.

It happens that in Sanskrit (an IE language, and an old one) there are two
words that both cover much of the semantic space of English "to be."  One
is "as" and the other is "bhuu."  Both are irregular, "as" more so.  Note
that one starts with a vowel and has an "s" in it (like "is") and one
starts with a "b" (like "be").  The vowel in "as" is unstable and drops in
many conjugations, leaving an "s"-initial form (or maybe it was the "s"
that was original and the "a-" got added).  Note its conjugation has a lot
in common with Romance "to be" verbs: (I) asmi (cf. English "am"), (thou)
asi (cf. Fr. "es"), (he/she/it) asti (cf. Fr./Lat. "est"), (we) sma.h
(cf. "sommes"), (you) stha, (they) santi (cf. "sont", "sunt").  It
certainly seems possible that the cognate to "bhuu" replaced "to be" in
some forms (be, been, being), while "as"'s cognate remained for many of the
present tense finite forms.  According to a note I saw once, the "w-" forms
of "to be" (was, were) are cognate to the Skt "vas" meaning "to live".
FWIW.

>>      Is there any evidence for suppletion in tlhIngan?

>What's suppletion exactly anyway (as I said, even though I kind of
>like languages a lot, I'm no linguist)...?

I think suppletion refers to the process by which one word will replace or
supplant the function of another, especially when this replacement only
happens in certain environments, leaving you with an apparent irregularity
(as above, or when the past tense of the verb "to wend" got to be used all
the time as past for "to go" and we wound up with the past tense of "go"
becoming "went").  Paul Coffey was speculating that maybe the collective
plurals we have in Klingon are examples of suppletion.

~mark

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