Anatoly Liberman, author of the Oxford Etymologist blog, has a post titled “How come the past of ‘go’ is ‘went?’” He doesn’t actually answer the question, because a real answer is impossible (at one point he says “I consulted numerous books on the history of the Indo-European languages … and discovered to my surprise that all of them enumerate the forms but never go to the beginning of time,” as if it were possible to go to the beginning of time), and he does some fancy rhetorical dancing (“No fully convincing explanation of this phenomenon exists, but some facts can be considered with profit”), but he does provide a handy introduction to the topic with a good set of examples. A warning: though you might think from reading his post that suppletion is an Indo-European thing, it’s not in the least restricted to that family; in Georgian, for example, the verb “to come” has four different roots.
The occurrence of suppletive forms is documented in a variety of languages. In most cases suppletive forms occur with words which are very common, and the various forms represent leftovers from a time when the roots of those forms had slightly different though closely related meanings, so that different forms were favoured in slightly different contexts and were later considered synonymous, causing the less frequent usages to disappear. Went is supposed to be the original past tense of to wend, as in the still current to wend one’s way which implies some duration. Perhaps to go (or its ancestor) did not imply duration and therefore was not used in the same contexts. Another example of suppletion is better, best as suppletive forms for good ( similar forms in German and Scandinavian languages show that the suppletion is very old): the root *bet (or something very similar) also meant good, but was probably used mostly, then later only, in the context of comparing degrees of goodness (similar examples exist in Latin, although with completely different roots than the Germanic ones: *bon- versus *mel-). In some other languages suppletion occurs between singular and plural verb roots. As an example, an action such as “running” performed by a single person or by a group or crowd does not make the same impression on a viewer: only in the case of a crowd can one use “pouring” as a synonym to describe the action, and the equivalent of “to pour” can thus become the plural form of a verb with a different root used when describing the action of a single runner.
My comment isn’t getting through over there, not even when I take the HTML out; there’s no mention of moderation or anything. So I’ll burden you with it:
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Uh, it is in Mandarin. I = wǒ, we = wǒmen, he/she/it (when “it” isn’t just zero) = tā, they = tāmen. The same holds for “you”, both normal and especially polite. The suffix -men is almost never applied to nouns, but it’s still obviously a suffix!
That’s what happened to the Romance “go” words. Their forms are cobbled together from three Latin verbs: ambulare “go for a walk”, vadere “go away, cede, buzz off”, and ire, good old “go”. The fad for dysphemisms at the beginning of Romance must have had a lot to do with this.
Speaking of ire, I bet that’s what eode is related to. The Old English dialect of Wessex regularly has eo where the rest of the Germanic world has i (seolfor – “silver”, German Silber).
German wenden “to turn around”, wandeln “to walk around in a very poetic manner”, where -l- once marked frequentatives, correctly implying duration in this case.
Polish spam! What happened to Turkish spam?
Isn’t the verb to be in French conjugated in the present tense an example of suppletion: Je suis, Nous sommes, Ils sont, but Tu es, Il est, Vous êtes (origination from essere and estar, if my Spanish/Italian are still fresh in my mind)?
The suffix -men is almost never applied to nouns, but it’s still obviously a suffix!
Technical nitpick: that doesn’t necessarily mean that “I is multiplied”. I don’t know where /men/ came from, but the pluralizing suffixes in Japanese (/-tati/, /-ra/, /-domo/, /-gata/) all etymologically mean something like “(X) and others”, “those with (X)”, “those near (X)”, etc. So arguably something like “watasitati” isn’t a plural pronoun in Japanese, but rather a singular-pronoun-plus-a-suffix. (There’s never a “multiple I” situation, only “I+” situations.) And those suffixes can be applied to things other than pronouns too: senseigata “teachers”, aitura “those guys”, etc.
On the other hand, we do have /wareware/ “we”, which is derived from /ware/ “me” through reduplication, which usually means straight-up “lots of X” in Japanese. That would seem to undermine his “individuals should not be multiplied” theorem a bit, but I suppose you could cling to the hope that the meaning of the reduplicated /ware/ is closer to “self (the concept)” than “I (an individual)”. I’m not sure whether that’s plausible or not.
Also, re this…
The main work on the origin of suppletion is a “famous” book written more than a hundred years ago, and it had important predecessors. “Everybody,” as various authors say, knows it. Well, apparently, the book’s fame is not universal, and one can devote long years to the study of historical linguistics and stay outside the group defined by the cover term “everybody.”
… It’s a bit rich for Liberman to complain about this sort of obscurity and clubbiness, but then fail to include the title of the book in his own write-up. Talk about pulling the ladder up after you!
m-l, on another subject, I just read in the NY Times:
How does one end up with a name like André Vingt-Trois? It wouldn’t happen in English (except in The Prisoner). According to Wikipedia, His surname, which translates to “twenty-three” in English, would seem to be explained, according to Vingt-Trois, by an ancestor who, as a child or baby, was abandoned and found on the 23rd day of the month. – but that doesn’t explain anything, really. (Feel free to ignore this if it seems too silly.)
but that doesn’t explain anything, really
(Doesn’t explain why anyone would have chosen or accepted 23 as a surname. I feel fairly sure that it wouldn’t have happened in England, so what made it acceptable in France?)
Yeah, I’m disappoint that Liberman didn’t cite the the century-old book known to the priesthood of philology. I wonder if it’s Hermann Osthoff, Vom Suppletivwesen der indogermanischen Sprachen (Heidelburg: J. Hörning, 1899).
The forms of the present indicative tense of the French verb être, “to be“, look suppletive but aren’t from an etymological perspective.
The French forms are derived from Latin esse: sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt, but ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European athematic verbal root reconstructed as *Hés- (sing.) alternating with *Hs- (plur.), where H is a “laryngeal”. The reconstructed forms are supposed to have been *Hés-mi, *Hés-i, *Hés-ti, *Hs-més, *Hs-tHé, *Hs-énti.
But the French passé simple of être — je fus, tu fus, il fut, nous fûmes, vous fûtes, ils furent — is indeed suppletive (from Latin fui, fuisti, fuit, fumus, fuistis, fuerunt).
So are the present indicative forms of the French verb aller, “to go”: je vais, tu vais, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont — which are derived from two different proto-French verbs.
@AJP: There’s a New York Times reporter named Jennifer 8 Lee, here’s an item with her byline:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/sergey-brin-explains-google-glasses/?ref=jennifer8lee
This may be a good time to tout Piotr Gąsiorowski’s blog Language Evolution. His most recent posts are about the suppletive stems of to be. (Earlier he did a series on the number 1.)
It’s a bit rich for Liberman to complain about this sort of obscurity and clubbiness, but then fail to include the title of the book in his own write-up.
Thanks for saying that; I’d meant to mention that annoying fact in my post but forgot.
This may be a good time to tout Piotr Gąsiorowski’s blog Language Evolution
Thanks, I’ve added it to my Google Reader feed! (Though how I’m going to keep up with blogs once goddam Google kills off GR in a few months, I don’t yet know. I hear good things about The Old Reader, and will probably give it a try as the fateful day draws nigher.)
Thanks, Matt. I think first names are often more idiosyncratic than last names, though.
Some suppletions are incomplete, contested, or in progress:
few>less>least
person>people
go [to hell and back]>went [to hell and back]>have been [to hell and back]
wreak [havoc]>wrought [havoc]
There’s also the odd case of French “jeune homme”>”jeunes gens”.
I’d have thought that “By choosing Bergoglio we chose someone who was not in the Curia system, because of his mission and his ministry,” said Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the archbishop of Paris, in a news conference” is remarkable for its ambiguity. Praps it’s clearer in French. Or Latin.
Osthoff’s book seems to be online here.
Really? I’m trying to find the ambiguity, and I can’t seem to. Where are you seeing it?
Osthoff’s book seems to be online here.
God bless the internet! It was fun to search the stacks of Sterling for such items, blow the dust off, and sit cross-legged in the aisle studying them, but it sure is more convenient to sit in my own study and read them at my leisure.
Le Monde blog:
AJP: André Vingt-Trois
This name is indeed very unusual. The proposed origin of the name may reflect the practice of an orphanage, a few centuries ago, to use the admission number of an abandoned child of unknown parentage as a a substitute for a last name (there may be other known instances of such a practice, justifying the interpretation). Such a child would have been given a “Christian name” on baptism, but had no last name as he had no known family (the child of an unwed mother would have used his mother’s first name as his last name*). If there were two or more children with the same first name, their numbers could have been used to differentiate them. Once out of the orphanage and needing a last name, the ancestor of the current archbishop may later have kept this number as a last name, not having a right to another. Alternately, it could have been a nickname given to or adopted by the ancestor because of some incident in which the number 23 was relevant, but this is perhaps less likely.
*In Les Misérables, the hero, Jean Valjean, an escaped convict, later reappears in society as “Monsieur Madeleine”. For a long time I wondered why he had chosen a woman’s first name as his new last name. I think that Madeleine was probably the first name of his mother. The female name, a very common one in France, implied a very humble origin and made it impossible for the police to trace birth records or search for relatives.
I’m surprised that he makes this claim:
> But in no language are the words for “girl” and “woman” derived from those for “boy” and “man.”
which is easily shown to be false — consider Hebrew, for example — and does not seem essential to his point.
(Unless by “no language” he means “no Indo-European language”, which would accord with the complaint in your last sentence.)
Thanks, you’ve confirmed that it’s as odd in France as elsewhere. 23 is a prime number, but I can’t see any significance, unfortunately. About Jean Valjean, are you saying that almost any surname that is also a female first name would imply humble origins? Surely no stigma, though, nowadays?
dearie, Francis has been a Jesuit priest since he was young. Jesuits typically work in poor neighbourhoods, in poverty themselves, a long distance from the Curia fat cats and any associated corruption. I think it’s great that they chose a Jesuit, not that anyone cares what I think.
I agree, for what it’s worth, which is next to nothing.
I suppose in ecclesiastical circles the last name “Vingt-Trois” might be taken to suggest an affinity for Pope John XXIII, but if you trust wikipedia the Archbishop in question was so named from birth (as was his father before him), before the Pope in question had acquired that name and number. I don’t know how easy or hard it is to switch surnames as a cultural or legal matter in France, but it’s reasonably common in the U.S. and I would think that odd-sounding surnames best explained by an ancestor having been an abandoned foundling who was taken in and renamed by bureaucratically-minded nuns would tend not to be preserved over the generations.
I don’t know to what extent in French onomastic culture many/most/all first names can be trnasformed into some not-too-weird-sounding surname that’s originally a patronym — but if so, if I had been running a religious foundling hospital I might have assigned surnames derived from the name of whatever saint happened to be commemorated on the day the particular baby had turned up on the doorstep, as being both auspicious and less likely to be a subsequent handicap than a number.
@Hat: “By choosing Bergoglio we chose someone who was not in the Curia system, because of his mission and his ministry,”
Does that mean that they chose him because of his mission and his ministry, or that he was not in the Curia system because of his mission and his ministry, or that they chose him because he was not in the Curia system? These are logically distinct possibilities.
Anyway, he’s a rash choice since he is now going to be endlessly accused of taking one side or the other in the Argentinian civil war between two bunches of murderous thugs.
Does that mean that they chose him because of his mission and his ministry, or that he was not in the Curia system because of his mission and his ministry, or that they chose him because he was not in the Curia system? These are logically distinct possibilities.
Ah, I see what you mean. I assumed it meant they chose him because of his mission and his ministry, and (as an additional point of information) he is also someone who was not in the Curia system, the relation of the Curia bit to his choosing being undefined. Two factors made other possibilities invisible to me: 1) semantics (my reading seemed the only sensible one given what I knew about the church and the process), and 2) punctuation (if it had meant he was not in the Curia system because of his mission and his ministry, the comma would not be there, in my scheme of things).
David: dysphemism (had to look up the word, I confess) has nothing to do, I think, with suppletion involving the verb “to go” in Italo-Western Romance.
IRE was originally a mildly regular verb (eo, is, it, imus, itis, eunt…), but as a consequence of sound changes in the transition from Latin to early Romance many of the shorter forms were simply too ambiguous (thus, EO must have become homophonous with the reflex of Classical EGO in much of the Empire). As a result VADERE was used, especially where the stem /i/- was followed by a non-syllabic ending. Hence the Old Spanish present tense of “to go”: vado/vo, vas, va, imos, ides, van.
Even this two-stem system, however, was not satisfactory over time: forms of the i-mos, i-des type were very liable to be (mis)interpreted as thematic vowel + ending instead of stem + ending.
In Spanish this problem was solved by extending the range of VADERE wherever a “zero morpheme” was present: hence Modern Spanish vamos, vais which replaced imos, ides. In the Central part of the Empire (France and North-Central Italy), however, stems deriving from a third verb, ANDARE in Italy, and *ALLARE in Gaul (whose etymology is unclear), were used to fill these “gaps”: hence French allons, allez and Italian andiamo, andate.
Romanian, in its splendid isolation, came up with a much more straightforward solution to the problem and wholly dumped IRE and replaced it with a single new verb, A MERGE, whose original meaning was “to dive”.
The “because of his mission and ministry” line doesn’t appear to be in the original french.
Surely Madeleine as a surname for an escaped criminal has something to do with the Magdalene Asylums, “institutions from the 18th to the late-20th centuries ostensibly to house ‘fallen women'” (Wikipedia). As a last name it would imply that the wearer was born out of wedlock in such an establishment, that his father was very likely unknown, and that it would therefore be “impossible for the police to trace birth records or search for relatives”, so they shouldn’t bother to try.
Hat, and any other Google Reader users:
The first thing to do is that as long as you are still using Google Reader, you must use Google Takeout to download your subscriptions file every time you add or remove a subscription. That way, you won’t lose anything when Google Reader finally vanishes. Click on the “Create Archive” button and then the “Download” button, and you’ll be asked for your password and then you’ll get a zip file. Open this file with any zipfile reader and extract the “subscriptions.xml” file. Almost any RSS reader will accept this file and allow you to re-create your subscriptions from it.
Armed with this file, I looked at The Old Reader, but I haven’t been able to get it to fully accept my subscriptions.xml file just yet. Indeed, I get the rather dispiriting message “There are 28341 users in the import queue ahead of you.” So I turned to another reader, Feedly, which does not require a subscriptions.xml file though it will accept it; you can just tell it to download your current situation directly from Google Reader, and use both of them concurrently. The only disadvantage to Feedly is that you have to download a browser plugin to use it, and it is limited to Firefox and Chrome only: you can’t read your feeds from a friend’s Windows box that only has IE on it. Feedly front-ends Google Reader itself, so it knows not only your subscriptions, but also what posts you have and haven’t read already. When Google Reader goes away, Feedly will be running its own service, or so they are promising now. In any case, make sure your subscriptions.xml file is up to date.
To make Feedly a little more like Google Reader, go into “Preferences” and choose “Full Articles” as the default view. The “Today” feed contains not today’s articles but your unread articles; the “All” feed displays just unread articles if there are any, but if none, all articles are shown. The check-mark button marks all displayed articles as read (which you have to do by hand in the “Today” feed).
Thanks, sounds like Feedly is worth trying. But knowing me, I’m not going to do a thing until Zero Hour is a lot closer.
I wanted to note that in the Na-Dene languages there’s suppletion in verbs of motion and verbs of handling, but rather than being tense-associated it’s instead plural-associated. So Tlingit has át x̱waagút ‘I went there’ using the root √gut ‘sg. go by foot’ and át wutuwa.át ‘we went there’ using the root √.at ‘pl. go by foot’. Compare this to x̱waax̱áa ‘I ate it’ and wutuwax̱áa ‘we ate it’. The verbs of handling also supplete for different categories of object, so that objects are classified partly by the verb root with which they’re handled. So Tlingit has xʼúxʼ át aawatée ‘he put a book (generic) there’, kʼwátʼ át akaawatée ‘he put an egg (small round) there’, and kées át akawsitée ‘he put a bracelet (framelike) there’, but gúxʼaa át aawatán ‘he put a cup (empty container) there’, gúxʼaa át aawa.ín ‘he put a cup of something (full container) there’, kʼoodásʼ át aawa.áx̱ ‘he put a shirt (flat flexible) there’, kʼoodásʼ át awlináa ‘he put shirts (flat flexible bundle) there’, x̱áat át awsitáa ‘he put a fish (dead animal) there’, káaxʼ át awsinúk ‘he put a chicken (live animal) there’. There’s lots of suppletion in the Na-Dene family, but it’s not in areas of the language that Indo-European linguists are accustomed to.
I listened to the news conference of the French cardinals https://soundcloud.com/cathobordeaux02-1/conf-presse-cardinaux-francais and Cardinal Vingt-Trois said: “il n’était pas dans le système curial par sa mission et par son ministère”. So, as there was no comma in the original, to me that means “he was not in the Curia system because of his mission and his ministry”.
JWB: I don’t know how easy or hard it is to switch surnames as a cultural or legal matter in France, but it’s reasonably common in the U.S.
I think the US is unusual among countries in this respect, because early immigrants embarking on a “new life” were encouraged to break ties with the old one, including picking new names. The few instances I have personally heard of in France involved immigrants with long foreign-sounding names, who were allowed to shorten or adapt them as part of the naturalization procedure (eg “Mogilewski” became “Moguy”). Native-born French people rarely try to change their names, although this is allowed under certain conditions (including having a ridiculous-sounding name) but the procedure is long and cumbersome. Since women as well as men legally keep their birth names all their lives (although usually being known socially by their husbands’ last names), they don’t have to petition a court to change their names in case of divorce, as happens in North America.
if I had been running a religious foundling hospital I might have assigned surnames derived from the name of whatever saint happened to be commemorated on the day the particular baby had turned up on the doorstep, as being both auspicious and less likely to be a subsequent handicap than a number.
The name of the saint of the day would probably have been assigned as a first name (for a long time a tradition especially in rural families) to a newly rescued baby not known to have been baptized. Some of those babies would arrive at the foundling hospital with some piece of identification (such as a paper with a first name). But the occurrence of many male names as last names may also have evolved from using the day’s saint as a last name for an unknown child.
In French the equivalent of “last name” is nom de famille, the family name usually transmitted in the father’s line. For centuries, an unknown (often irresponsible) father meant no family name for the child. I suppose that adults brought up in those circumstances would choose a last name when they needed to produce one, often a nickname that already identified them, or some other word with some meaning to them. For instance, names like “Lajeunesse” (‘youth’), “Laframboise” (‘raspberry’) or “Laliberté” (‘freedom’) often appear in older literature as names of servants or other subordinates, and such names now current as family names most likely started as assigned nicknames or individually chosen names. That’s what I think might have happened with “Vingt-Trois”, whatever its origin.
AJP: are you saying that almost any surname that is also a female first name would imply humble origins? Surely no stigma, though, nowadays?
A child born out of wedlock, unrecognized by its father, and recorded only by its mother’s first name instead of a family name, would ipso facto have been considered as of humble origins in the period described in Les Misérables. The law no longer denies a child a last name, and if there is no recorded father the child’s last name is that of its mother. I am not aware that there is currently a stigma about female first names used as last names, but there would have been at the time of Monsieur Madeleine. These last names are relatively rare, except in the French Caribbean islands because of naming practices sometimes dating from the days of slavery.
MHendery: Madeleine as a surname for an escaped criminal has something to do with the Magdalene Asylums, “institutions from the 18th to the late-20th centuries ostensibly to house ‘fallen women'” (Wikipedia).
That would be a possibility in an English novel, but I don’t recall reading about the name being used in French for such establishments. Wikipedia.fr gives the word as denoting (among other things) some kind of hospital, hospice or shelter, originally for travellers, but does not even mention women. The most fashionable church in Paris is called La Madeleine, probably because it was built on or near the site of such a hospice, but it is unlikely that it would have retained a name associated in the public mind with “fallen women”.
James C., thanks for the Tlingit examples. My examples (given in English but not about English, for singular/plural suppletion) come from not too far from yours.
comments about the new pope
There are two sets of comments from French sources: an official one from the archbishop of Paris, contrasting his “mission” and “ministry” to the shenanigans in the Roman Curia, the other one from a blog, about his Argentine nationality and Italian roots allowing him to bridge the cultural gap between South America and Italy.
La Madeleine (the Paris church)
I guessed wrong. Wikipedia gives the history of the church in great detail, and it has nothing to do with a supposed hospice, etc, let alone one for “fallen women”.
For reasons best known to himself, my grandson’s father never got around to attaching his name to the birth certificate during the legal period for doing so, and consequently my daughter’s son is surnamed Cowan. I had long since reconciled myself to not having descendants named Cowan, and now I most likely will.
@marie-lucie: they don’t have to petition a court to change their names in case of divorce, as happens in North America. No longer true in California. You can be known by whatever last name you like–with government agencies, banks, whatever–provided you aren’t changing your name in order to commit a fraud. It can be tedious for women to get driver’s licences and insurance etc. changed post-divorce, but they don’t need the court’s authority to do it.
Indeed, that’s true everywhere in the U.S. and always has been, except for a while in Hawaii. Courts do not consummate name changes; they merely take judicial notice that the change has already occurred. When Mr. Kabotchnik of Boston changed his name to Cabot, the famous Cabot family went to court to try and stop him, but were non-suited; as a result, the Official Boston Toast was changed:
Well, here’s to good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God.
I’m always wrong when I try to say something about Icelandic, but as I understand it, the Icelandic system would in principle assign metronymics when the father was unknown, but more often the mother’s father’s name was used as a faux-patronymic to avoid the stigma. With the advent of feminism metronymics became more popular even for children of properly coupled parents, removing the stigma. Or maybe rather making that the least stigmatizing option.
In Medieval times there was a little church consecrated to Saint Mary Magdalene in a hamlet along the road through the forest some 35 km southeast of Trondheim. That’s a rare thing for Scandinavia, and it’s even stranger since it’s not associated with any sort of hospital. I think the explanation is pragmatic. The feast of Saint Mary Magdalene is July 22, one week before the great feast of Saint Olaf was celebrated in the city, attracting pilgrims and other travellers from near and far. They would have been passing through the hamlet in great numbers around that day, and a convenient local feast would have encouraged them to stay for a night or two.
Details may vary among different states and Canadian provinces about women changing their names after divorce, but it is usually something official. When I first came to Canada I was surprised at the number of notices in newspapers placed by women with very ordinary names changing them to names that were just as ordinary, but no name changes for men. I found out later these were divorced women regaining their “maiden” names, not changing them to names they liked better on esthetic grounds.
Publication in the newspapers is a convenient way of providing public notice of the change.
I’m surprised that he makes this claim:
which is easily shown to be false — consider Hebrew, for example —
Actually, it turns out that ish ‘man’ and isha are unrelated too. There has been a convergence, as with English female < femella < femina, which is unrelated to male but has come to sound like male with a prefix.
I will assert again that “male” and “female” are not unrelated. The word “female” is a chimera of “male” and “feminella.”
Are at least “man” and “woman” related, or are those a coincidence too?
(And I guess the Hebrew reference might also have been to yeled ‘boy’ and yelda ‘girl’, which are also likely related to each other.)
yalda.
I headed over to the ASJP database, and browsed away. There are not many similar man/woman pairs, and those I can find are not necessarily related: Cubeo (S.Am.) poeko/poek3, Dedua (PNG) Nak/Nik, etc. All the same, one can’t claim it’s a strict universal, and that these words are never related.
Of course woman is OE wīf-mann. The word was grammatically masculine in Old English (though occassionally showing feminine concord, as in seo wifman, with a feminine demonstrative). OE mann could mean ‘human being’ irrespective of a person’s sex, and had a secondary meaning of ‘servant, subordinate’.
Well, in Romance there are plenty of pairs like muchacho/muchacha and ragazzo/ragazza (though it may be hard to draw the line between one term being derived from another and one term having two gendered forms); boy and girl probably weren’t the best examples for him to use.
anem “man”, anum “woman”, anim “people”…
As Lazar says…
Likewise puer/puella in Latin, where puer is clearly primary. Boy/girl are certainly not good examples to pick, not least because both words are often based on a form meaning “child”, which in many languages is then also “boy” by default.
In fact, I’d say using boy/girl as an example at all reveals straight away that you’re in the business of hand-waving rather than evidence. Latin is not exactly obscure.
More fundamentally, his basic notion that suppletion is driven by semantics is plainly untenable. A moment’s reflection would have saved him from it. It is a fairly unusual feature of Indoeuropean that flexion is remarkably suppletive, for example. Do we conclude that the Romans felt that “belonging to a king” was a basically different notion to “belonging to a woman”, leading to regis but feminae? Perhaps a mulier is more regal than a femina…
“We” is a particularly misleading example to pick; so called first-person plural pronouns are uncontroversially not really plurals of the first person singular. His going on to use “they” as an example (“not the plural of ‘he, she, it'”) must mean he’s (surprisingly) never read anything on the history of the borrowing of the Norse form, or what might have motivated it.
Why do languages vary in how much suppletion they show? If your answer is “semantics”, you then need to explain why (say) Greek speakers feel that “having gone” is a fundamentally different concept from “going” but Turkish speakers don’t. The argument is either circular or ludicrous.
This is all music to my ears; Liberman has irritated me ever since I had to edit his stuff for a magazine quite a few years ago.
In fact, you could say that the idea that semantics drives suppletion is exactly wrong; it’s only truly suppletion if there isn’t a meaning difference. If he means that suppletion has arisen from loss of earlier meaning distinctions (not a priori impossible, after all) then this needs evidence and examples, not post factum assertions that it must have happened like that. I suspect there actually are examples of this in the world’s languages, though I can’t think of any offhand (to be a bit fairer to him, perhaps “went” is just such a rarity.) It must be a much less common way of filling gaps that have arisen in a paradigm by historical change than analogical levelling or maybe even borrowing (as with “they.”)
What he’s noticed is a real phenomenon: suppletion is commoner in common words. He’s just got cause and effect back to front: rarer words are more prone to morphological levelling.
I wonder if the various Indoeuropean “be” verb roots could be a candidate for this sort of suppletion by loss of earlier fine meaning distinctions? It’s a pretty slippery verb what with being a copula in at least two separate senses, marking existence and location, and overlapping in sense with “become.”
I imagine entire theses have been written on this. Hatters will know…
The common mixup of PIE *bʰuH- with *h₁es- was caused by loss of “inherent” aspect (originally a lexical property of individual roots). The former was aoristic (action as a simple whole, ‘increase, become, come into existence’), the latter imperfective (action in progress, ‘go on being’). This aspectual contrast competed with a derivational mechanism — change of aspect by morphological means. In most pairs of etymologically distinct aorist/imperfect roots one member was eliminated in “dialectal” IE (or changed its meaning to avoid direct competition). The Germanic strong preterite formally continues the PIE perfect, and since *h₁es- seems to have been defective in this respect, the perfect of *h₂wes- ‘stay, spend the night’ was co-opted as the past tense of ‘to be’.
The segregation of those forms was not yet complete in Old English, hence two infinitives, wesan and bēon. The former had no present-tense personal forms; the latter, no past tense, and it competed with reflexes of *h₁es- in the present tense. The *h₁es- root had no past tense, no infinitive and no participles of its own.
Latin nominative Iuppiter versus accusative Iouem is a sort-of example, I suppose, with the “father” element (presumably retained because the form would otherwise be short and ambiguous) bleached of its meaning.
The New Guinea language Yimas makes the plural of narmaŋ “woman” as ŋaykum from the stem of “mother”, but “mothers” itself is ŋaykumpam, and while Yimas nouns show suppletive plurals like Greek shows suppletive aorists, the word ŋaykum seems to be unusual in having a suppletive stem with an identifiable alternative meaning.
Human-reference words are in any case always liable to the problem that it’s difficult to be sure there’s really no subtle semantic difference between supposedly suppletive forms. (This is also why, of course “man” versus “woman” is a daft example for the absence of “suppletion.”)
@Piotr G: Thanks!
Without the “father” part the nom.sg. *d(i)jeus (which varied between one and two syllables) would have become Lat. *Iūs or possibly Diūs, admittedly opaque (“irregular”) but hardly short enough to be of no use. The old acc.sg. *d(i)jēm survived as diēm thanks to its semantic specialisation as ‘day’ and built its own analogical case-forms (diēs, etc.). What actually happened to the PIE nom.sg. was replacement by a fixed phrase in the VOCATIVE case: *djeu ph₂ter ‘O Father Dyeus!’ already in Proto-Italic. The most frequently invoked god may be better known in the vocative than in the nominative. Note that the exclamations Bože and Gospodi are still used in Russian while other vocatives have been abandoned.
“In this book, the words he, his, and him refer to the masculine, embracing the feminine.” —source forgotten
Hat, can you release my comment?
Haven’t got a comment in moderation, sorry. It must have simply been eaten.
I wrote:
yalda, not yelda.
I headed over to the ASJP database, and browsed away. There are not many similar man/woman pairs, and those I can find are not necessarily related: Cubeo (S. Am.) poeko-poek3, Dedua (PNG) Nak-Nik, etc. All the same, one can’t claim it’s a strict universal, and that these words are never related.
Are there any examples of a language where the usual words for “man” and “woman” are based on the same stem, and yet the relationship between the two is not part of a more general way of marking male/female pairs?
The reason I ask this it that if the distinction is part of a more general process, it seems more reasonable to regard the underlying common stem as actually meaning “human being.” It wouldn’t then have to “count” as a case of the word for “woman” being derived from the word for “man.” With this (pretty major, admittedly) tweak, it’s maybe conceivable that Liberman is right that no language derives the word for “woman” from “man.”
[In either case, there isn’t any question of “suppletion”; as I said, “man” vs “woman” is a singularly bad pair to pick if you’re talking about suppletion. Perhaps in some mystical sense …]
(It occurs to me en passant that this discussion of “basic” meanings interacts with the idea of semantic primes which was discussed here a while ago.)
Now, if the Radch language had separate words for “man” and “woman” that would be suppletion…
Likewise puer/puella in Latin, where puer is clearly primary
Strictly speaking, there are two pairs puer / puera and puellus / puella. But puera and puellus, though both attested, are much rarer than their alternatives for some reason.
It was here that I first learned about the unrelatedness of Heb. ish “man” and isha “woman”, but I still wonder about it. Did they end up as semantic counterparts partly because of their similarity (i.e. by folk etymology), or are we really looking at a complete coincidence? And if only the latter comes from a root ‘-n-sh, why does the former have a plural anashim?
@TR:
I believe it is common cross-linguistically for there to be an association between diminutives and feminine gender. A possible weak example in English and French is the use of “-ette” to form female-gendered alternatives to a base noun with no diminutive suffix, as in “Smurf” vs. “Smurfette” (who’s just a female Smurf, I don’t think she’s at all physically smaller than the other Smurfs).
I’ve also read somewhere that (semantic, not morphological) diminutive meaning can be one aspect of the complicated set of interacting criteria for German gender assignment (supposedly, words for larger things are more likely to be masculine than semantically similar words for smaller things).
In some languages, there is a more obvious association, e.g. converting a noun to feminine gender has a diminutive meaning or converting a noun to masculine gender has an augmentive meaning. This is apparently the case in Maasai: “Maasai Gender in Typological Perspective,” by Doris L. Payne, gives the following examples (ol~ɔl~ɔlk is the masculine prefix, en~ɛn~ɛnk is the feminine prefix)
ɛn-kalamu: ‘pen, pencil’
ol-kalamu: ‘large pen, pencil’
ɔl-abaani: ‘male doctor, healer’
ɛnk-abaani: ‘female/small doctor, quack (pej)’
ɔl-alashɛ: ‘brother’
ɛnk-anashɛ: ‘sister’
ɛnk-alashɛ: ‘weak brother (pej)’
ɔlk-anashɛ: ‘very large sister (pej)’
Here is the link to the paper mentioned in my previous comment: http://sal.research.pdx.edu/PDF/272Payne.pdf
Also, Slavic nicknames very often end in -a, making them look feminine, and conversely the way to create terms designating women often involves a diminutive suffix in the bargain (as when Russian turns -ist m. into -ist-ka f.).
“…the way to create terms designating women often involves a diminutive suffix in the bargain (as when Russian turns -ist m. into -ist-ka f.).”
Curiously, Russian speakers do not perceive it as diminutive in words like артистка, журналистка, финалистка. In fact, radical feminists have suggested a uniform approach to gendered occupational terms: adding -ка to the male form to achieve perfect gender symmetry. The -ист(ка) words would remain unchanged. A female профессор would become профессорка and секретарша would be “corrected” to секретарка.
Just stumbled upon on мехкарий (б-class)(Chechen), looked it up and it turns out to be the plural of йоI (й-class) meaning: 1) daughter 2) girl.
yalda
It turns out that the name Yalda, as in Yalda Hakim is related, although in a roundabout way:
Etymology
Loanword (with accompanying change of meaning) from Persian Christian technical term for Christmas, in the early church celebrated on the winter solstice, from Syriac Christian technical term for Christmas, Classical Syriac ܝܠܕܐ (yaldā, “birth, nativity”), i.e. of Christ.
Proper noun
یلدا • (yaldâ)
1. Yalda, an Iranian festival celebrated during the longest and darkest night of the year (i.e. winter solstice)[3]
2. A female given name, Yalda.
یلدا
Unaccountably, I do not seem to have mentioned North Welsh dynes “woman”, transparently derived from dyn “man” with the productive feminine-forming suffix -es. Liberman was just talking nonsense. “No language”, indeed!
Liberman was just talking nonsense.
As he often seems to. I admire his zeal, but find myself less inclined to actually read him as the years go by.
What etymologist gets everything right?
I read Liberman’s blog.
One of the things I often like there is history of scholarship.
What etymologist gets everything right?
It’s not about getting everything right, it’s about his pompous luxuriating in the weeds of implausible and just plain silly theories because he can’t bear the words “Origin obscure,” all the while intimating that he is the only scholar you need to pay attention to. He’s the apotheosis of everything I disliked about the professoriat when I was in grad school. I’m not saying he’s always wrong or that anyone shouldn’t read him, just explaining why I’ve gotten tired of him.
“There’s a New York Times reporter named Jennifer 8 Lee,”
Here’s the explanation:
“Lee was not given a middle name at birth so she chose “8.” when she was a teenager.[11][1][12] In Chinese culture, the number eight symbolizes prosperity and good luck” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee).
André Vingt-Trois? […] an ancestor who, as a child or baby, was abandoned and found on the 23rd day of the month
i wasn’t around as much back in 2013, so missed this. but i know from highschool friends that their surname, del tredici (they’re relatives of the composer z”l and the botanist), is supposed to be from an forebear’s bed number at the orphanage where he grew up. so assuming that the accounts are accurate (always a question with family names), i wonder whether this was a standard way – in france and italy, or perhaps more widely – of naming kids with uncertain paternity and no maternal family willing or able to claim them?
(my family doesn’t do middle names – they’re kinda goyish – and at certain points in my life i’ve used a numeral, though chosen with as solid a numerological reason as lee’s)