LL-L "Grammar" 2005.10.06 (10) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 06 October 2005 * Volume 10
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From: Ian Pollock<ispollock at shaw.ca>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar"

Hello!
I was thinking the other day about how common suppletion seems to be in 
Indo-European languages in very specific circumstances. (Suppletion is the 
replacement of one part of the paradigm of a word by another, unrelated 
word, e.g., "to go/went" (where 'went' is properly from the verb "to wend" 
as in "to wend one's way up a mountain path).")
What strikes me is that the *place* where suppletion occurs seems to be very 
consistent across languages in some cases, whereas the actual words involved 
are etymologically unrelated. Let me show you what I mean:
English:
1.) good / better / best
2.) bad / worse / worst
3.) much / more / most
Spanish:
1.) bueno / mejor / (lo) mejor
2.) malo / peor / (lo) peor
3.) mucho / más / (lo) más
Russian:
1.) ??????? / ????? / ?????? ( xoroSIj / lutSe / lutSIj )
2.) ?????? / ???? / ?????? ( ploxoj / xuZe / xudSIj )
3.) ????? / ?????? / ??????? ( mnogo / boljSe / boljSIj )
Ukrainian:
1.) ?????? / ????? / ????????? ( dobrIj / kraStSe / najkraStSij )
2.) ??????? / ????? / ????????? (pohanIj / hirSe / najhirSIj )
3.) ?????? / ?????? / ?????????? ( bahato / biljSe / najbiljSIj )
(Formal) Finnish (*not Indo-European but heavily influenced)
1.) hyvä / parempi / parhaiten
2.) huono / pahempi / pahin
3.) paljon / enemmän / eniten

Another biggie is "to go", but I don't feel like collecting the data for 
that one right now - suffice to say English, Spanish, and Russian forms, at 
least, are all perfect mirrors of each other and yet etymologically no 
relations crop up. You can see that if you look through, some items are 
related across languages. But the point is that always in a specific 
language the forms differ from each other.

I guess my question is - why so consistently those three or four lexical 
items in Indo-European and contact languages? Everybody I've asked so far 
says "because they're common", but that hardly satisfies me. It doesn't need 
to happen in Mandarin: good is ? hao3 and better is ?? geng2hao3 "more 
good".
What I'm leading to is that it seems as if, no matter what the actual root 
used, there is a compulsion in IE languages to differentiate these items. As 
if the structure of their differentiation mattered more than the chosen 
words themselves.
One working theory I came up with is that most of these languages were 
codified by upper-class speakers familiar with classical languages. Perhaps 
they intentionally used suppletion on the Greco-Latin model, suppressing 
colloquial forms which may indeed have been based on the same root word. But 
I really don't know.
Any ideas, or am I barking up a nonexistent tree?
-Ian Pollock. 

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