irrregular plurals

[Waruno Mahdi]

> The only example I can think of in English where the
> singular and plural of a noun are formed from
> unrelated stems is the rather weak one of
> person/people

I think this is more an instance of _people_ not having a singular,
(cf. trousers, scissors....), rather than of _person_ having a
suppletive paradigm (plural: _persons_).

Similarly, German has _Leute_ "people" which has no singular. All
possible singular conterparts have their own plural (_Mensch_ -
Menschen_, _Person_ - _Personen_, etc.)

Russian has a real suppletive example: _celovek_ "person, human
being" (_c_ is like unaspirated English _ch_) vs. _ljudi_ "people"
(_j_ is palatal glide). The respective unsuppletive complementary
forms do not exist in the modern language, as far as I know not even
as archaisms.
Then there is _deti_ "children" for which the etymological singular
_ditja_ is practically not used in the modern language. Instead,
one says _rebjonok_ "small child, baby", which does however have
an own plural: _rebjonki_, and thus parallels the English and
German examples.

Indonesian Malay seems an example for a contrary situation: word pairs
reflecting etymological singular/plural forms, are not felt or treated
as if they formed common morphological paradigms, e.g.:

_roh_ "soul"              - _arwah_ "[the] spirits"
_unsur_ "element [lit.]"  - _ anasir_ "elements [persons]"
_wali_ "ward, saint"      - _aulia_ "holy persons"

These are loans from Arabic, the vowel-intercalating morphology of
which generally remains untransparent to the common Indonesian Malay
speaker. The respective Arabic etymons form singular/plural pairs.

Happy weekend to all,

Waruno