Some notes on suppletion

Suppletion with verbs

Suppletion with nouns?

• cow - cows - cattle
• person - persons - people
• ship - ships - fleet

Suppletion with adjectives and adverbs

• good - from a root meaning 'fitting, suitable'
• better/best - no history beyond Gmc - ablaut variant of (to) boot
• well - from same root as will - IE wel- 'wish, prefer'

• bad - uncertain origin
• worse/worst - no history beyond Gmc

• bon-us 'good'
• mel-ior 'better'
• opt-imus 'best'

• small, smaller, smallest
• little, smaller vs. %littler, smaller vs. %littlest

Suppletion with numerals

• one - fir-st
• widespread
  • German: eins - er-st (cf. English ere 'before')
  • Latin: unus - pr-imus
  • Greek: (h)ena - pr-o-tos

• two - second
• already in Old English: two - other
  • Latin: duo - secundus
  • French: deux - second (but also deux-ième)

Suppletion for the ordinal of one is very common among the world's languages. Suppletion for one and two is also common, but tends to be an areal feature of Europe (not necessarily Indo-European, though, as it is also found in Finnish).

The European areal pattern in Finnish (Stolz and Robbers 2016, Table 10)

• 1 - yksi - ensimmäinen (based on ensi- 'foremost')
• 2 - kaksi - toinen 'another'
• 3 - kolme - kolma-s
• 4 - neljä - neljä-s
• 5 - viisi - viide-s

Suppletion on steroids in Kalderash, a Romani language (Stolz and Robbers 2016, Table 7)

• 1 - jekh - jekh-to (regular ordinal), anglunó (cf. anglé 'earlier'), p(é)rvo (borrowed from Serbian prv-o 'first')

This is as if English had:

• one-th, first, premier
• two-th, other, second

Bizarrely, Sardinian is completely regular (Stolz and Robbers 2016, Table 7):

• 1 - unu - su ‘e unu
• 2 - duos - su ‘e duos
• 3 - tres - su ‘e tres
• 4 - battor - su ‘e battor
• 5 - chimbe - su ‘e chimbe
• ...

Reference