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Suppletions for "to be"

Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:05 am
by alice
This is a thread for verbs and other words which have supplied suppletive forms of "to be" in various languages. To start with, in IE alone there are "to sit" and "to stand" in Italic, "to remain" in Germanic, and perhaps most oddly "to arise" in Old English. What others do you know of?

Re: Suppletions for "to be"

Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 6:43 am
by Zju
Isn't 'be' itself from PIE *bʰuH- 'to grow' with an intermediate sense of 'to become'?
Anyway, for a field day of content verbs grammaticalising into copulas, somebody could bring up Sino-Tibetan copulas.

Re: Suppletions for "to be"

Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 7:28 am
by zompist
Mandarin 是 shì 'be' was a demonstrative pronoun 'this' in Old Chinese.

There's also OC 为 wéi 'make' > 'function as ' > 'be'.

Re: Suppletions for "to be"

Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:38 pm
by Linguoboy
For Japanese, the polite copula です desu is generally considered a contraction of であります de arimasu, where the first element is a locative particle and the latter is a verb of existence. But other contractions have been proposed, such as で‎ する de suru, with the light verb generally used to verbify nouns etc. The plain form だ da has some inflections supplied by the verb なる naru "reach".

Re: Suppletions for "to be"

Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 6:42 pm
by So Haleza Grise
Australian languages sometimes use "sit" and "stand" in a similar way to "be". Bardi is one example. There is one language (unfortunately can't remember the name!) where the correct verb, for inanimates, depends on the shape and position of the object - it could be any of "stand" (for example a spear in the ground), "sit" or "crouch".

Re: Suppletions for "to be"

Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 3:14 pm
by alice
Another is "Iba" in Spanish, for the imperfect, which has a converse in English "I've been to...".