Suppletives in non-verb inflections

[Estav]

There is a blog post by Martin Haspelmath that mentions Bobaljik and also discusses Beata Moskal's work about nouns and case/number suppletion: "Number suppletion vs. case suppletion: Does “locality” provide an explanation?". Haspelmath indicates that case suppletion seems to be rare but not unknown outside of pronominal paradigms. Moskal and Bobaljik are both authors on a 2018 paper Case and Number Suppletion in Pronouns.

[Pabappa]

Oh. There's also possession.... some languages where nouns take suffixes to show possession will have suppletive forms for kinship terms ... e.g. the word for mother might be mama/tšese/tšesa for 1p/2p/3p. This is probably also more common than case based suppletion . I use this in conlangs, even, but didn't think of it right off.

[hwhatting]

Ooh, I knew there was another Slavic one: in Russian, лет, the genitive plural of лето "summer" is used as the genitive plural of год "year" after numerals.

huh! i wonder how that came about. does it stay "year" (instead of "summer") in the genitive singular? and the regular genitive plural is used if there isn't a numeral in front of it?

Yes, it stays год in the genitive singular, and in the plural if there is no numeral (or any other quantifier, like "many" or "several") coming before it.
Polish has something similar, with rok in the singular and lata in the plural, but in Polish lata is always used in the plural, including without numerals.
Russian is also an example for suppletive words for "child" in the singular and plural: sg. rebyonok, pl. deti.

[Richard W]

Early Modern English had the s/pl cow, kine, which however was regular in Germanic.

Are you saying that English innovated an irregularity, or something else? Either way, this isn't suppletion.

The pair seems irregular but is (mostly) the result of regular sound changes. (looks at Wiktionary) Old English had singular cū, plural cȳ /kuː, kyː/ via regular umlauting. In Middle English, the plural seemed to have gathered a second plural marker -n at some point (-en is still a common plural marker in German, and survives in a handful of English words like children, oxen), plus /yː/ merged with /iː/ so we had singular cou /kuː/, plural kyne /kiːn/). Later and the Great Vowel Shift happened, yielding /kaʊ, kaɪn/. The same vowel alternation appears in mouse/mice, louse/lice.

That's what I thought, but the sentence could be read as saying that the alternation is the reflex of a regular plural in Germanic, which would be more interesting. A late Old English genitive plural cyna is reported.

[Nortaneous]

Plural suppletion. Seri is a well-known example - its plurals are typically not very regular, and in some cases this rises to suppletion: ziix 'thing', xiica 'things'. (Another common example is cmiique 'person' / comcaac 'people', but the consonants are the same (<qu> /k/ before front vowels), so this is probably like bean / mna although of course Seri is an isolate so this can't be known. Also Yimas: narmaŋ 'woman', ŋaykum 'women'.

[Yalensky]

Ooh, I knew there was another Slavic one: in Russian, лет, the genitive plural of лето "summer" is used as the genitive plural of год "year" after numerals.

huh! i wonder how that came about. does it stay "year" (instead of "summer") in the genitive singular? and the regular genitive plural is used if there isn't a numeral in front of it?

Yes, it stays год in the genitive singular, and in the plural if there is no numeral (or any other quantifier, like "many" or "several") coming before it.
Polish has something similar, with rok in the singular and lata in the plural, but in Polish lata is always used in the plural, including without numerals.
Russian is also an example for suppletive words for "child" in the singular and plural: sg. rebyonok, pl. deti.

Furthermore, the regular plural of ребёнок also exists (ребята), but it has shifted meaning and means "guys" more or less, and is especially frequent as a casual term of address for a group of young people.

The non-suppletive singular of дети is дитя (irregularly declined anyways) which is dated. I've seen it in reading 19th C poetry.