Morphological Aberration

Understanding why it is incorrect to say “I goed”

On top of being a hodgepodge of multitudinous loanwords, the English language enjoys sprinkling confusion and doing whatever it be to exhaust its learners. It is not the odd man out, however, since such absurdity presents in many natural living languages, and we just have to accept it. Photograph credit: Markus Winkler.

Once, I had an English teacher who taught his subject in a fascinating way. Not only was he knowledgeable in the field, but he was also the one making me enthusiastic of English, as well as other languages. He was an exuberant guy who would not let his class turn into a bunch of hypersomniacs. Even though being reliant on textbooks is inexorable to all serious teachers, let alone to him, he did not instruct us to listen to all words that he uttered on reading incessantly his textbook. Instead, he would explain key details every time he stepped into a new theme.

We were reading a passage about the human population — I am unable to retrieve the specifics. He was elucidating its vocabulary, which I enjoyed wholeheartedly, and I raised my hand in order to ask his permission to go to the toilet — wait, no… to find out why the word person had the plural people. “Shouldn’t it be more logical to say ‘persons’?”, quoth I. My teacher, knowing the answer, said that people was originally its own word. As time went on, Anglophones confused it with persons, the meaning of which was akin to that of people, and these two words competed in use. Eventually, people stood as the winner and has become the predominantly used plural of person.

I raised my eyebrows, not convinced with his elaboration, until I confirmed the veracity of his statement by doing my own research. It astonished me that English speakers chose the etymologically irrelated people to substitute the handily imaginable persons. I discovered hereafter that it was not the only irregularity in English. There were, in fact, a few more. I ran across an article discussing the phenomenon, to which it referred as suppletion.

The so-called linguistic process existing in other languages, among which is Spanish, which has far more suppletive forms. I understand the struggle faced by language learners to tackle them, because memorising them and avoiding using substandard, non-suppletive forms was painstaking. It is not easy for any beginner, but native speakers seem not to have any problem with them. Interested, I decided to do a little research on the matter — and have got some answers.

Addressing the confusion

Students are taught that one does not say goed as the preterite of go — the correct way is went. However, they do not understand, nor does their teacher feel the necessity to explain it to them, why it is what it is. While most of these students are not fascinated to plunge into the anomaly, linguists and a handful of glossophiles have endeavoured to make sense of it because — they think — speakers would not come up out of nowhere with such unpredictable occurrences; indeed, they do not.

It is helpful to distinguish irregularity from suppletion. The first one refers to the usage of an inflected form obtained through a pattern usually unused. On the other hand, suppletion means utilising such forms not only heteroclite, but also coming from etymologically distant words. We shall see how irregularity appears in the English language, for which Juge (1999) presented a number of reasons.[1]

The divergent

Has anyone noticed how strange the English orthography is? Some words, while we believe they should be written in the same way, happen to bear different spellings; for instance, way and weigh, as well as night and knight. It turns out that all these words result from sound change, which, albeit rarely, also leads to suppletion. An example of it is say /seɪ/, becoming says /sɛz/ when conjugated in the third-person singular. One may say, “Hold on, isn’t it regularly formed?” The irregularity appears only in pronunciation, however, it still counts as a suppletion.[2]

Another process involved in irregularisation is analogy. Learners of English find it challenging to memorise some irregular verbs with vowels that alternate depending on the tense they are using, the most famous example of which, probably, is to sing, which turns into sang (preterite) and sung (past participle). Native speakers do not consider difficult, however, what they cannot resist is applying the irregularity to similar verbs. One of them is to bring, which conjugates as brought (preterite and past participle) in standard language, but some nonstandard varieties have brang (preterite) and brung (past participle).[3] Sometimes, it is the analogical irregular form that displaces is regular counterpart, due to which reason we say caught as the preterite and past participle of to caught, not catched.[4]

The usurpators

Now, let us buckle down to suppletion. I shall begin with the verb to go, the story of which, I find, is the most appealing. Its preterite form, went, comes from a verb of similar meaning, to wend, which survives in our modern-day language though regularised, wended being its preterite and past participle. Prior to suppletion, what was the preterite of to go, initially? As a matter of fact, it was the suppletive yode, which has become obsolete at the moment, and originated from Old English ēode /ˈeːo̯de/, unrelated to its infinitive, gān /ɡɑːn/, in the context of historical linguistics.[5]

In English, suppletion happens — very infrequently — due to that various words, all of which not historicaly correlated and most often verbs, are alike in their definitions, leading to speakers gradually considering these words to be variants of a single lexeme.[6] I shall refer to the aforesaid person–people suppletive paradigm, which has been intensifyingly common since recent decades. The word people refers to a “group of persons”, and there exists the plural people, meaning “groups of persons”. People kept confusing it with persons, and Modern English has tended to use people as the plural of person. While the regular person–people paradigm is not obsolete, it is now restricted to formal circumstances, e.g. legal documents, and literary register.[7]

Beyond English

As a native speaker of Indonesian, I notice that I have never stumbled upon the phenomenon of suppletion in the language with which I grew up. There are, certainly, a handful of irregular forms in Indonesian, one of the most infamous examples is punya ‘to have’, not becoming memunyai in its transitive form but mempunyai in lieu; punya results from the metanalysis of mpu ‘owner’ and the suffix -nya ‘his, her, its’, whence mempunyai ‘to become the owner(s) of’. After ceasing to understand its original meaning, they reinterpreted punya as the basic form, not mpu.[8] The mempunyai phenomenon relates to irregularity, notwithstanding.

In the Romance languages, suppletion is far more prevalent, and often it happens to verbs as well. I shall, without doubt, use Spanish as an example. The verb ser ‘to be’, not to be confused with estar, also ‘to be’, has numerous suppletive forms in its conjugation. If one uses the past tense, the letter ‘f’ appears suddenly whereas the infinitive ser has none; thus, fui ‘I was’, fuiste ‘thou wast’, etc. The present subjunctive forms has also been contaminated by suppletion; they have proceeded from those of Old Spanish seer ‘to sit’; thus, sea ‘I be’, seas ‘thou beest’, etc., instead of Latin sim, sīs, etc.

It requires understanding that Spanish conjugation does not work the way that the English conjugation does. It is much harder — believe me. Usually, the original forms were replaced by others due to the original ones lacking distinguishing sounds. The verb ir ‘to go’ is a direct descendant of Latin īre, but almost the entire Latin conjugation has become extinct in Spanish. A Latin speaker would say it ‘he goes’, iī ‘I went’, and iit ‘he went’, but a Hispanophone says va, fui, and fue. If it were the case that Hispanophone used the inherited Latin forms, confusion would inevitably happen since Spanish frequently drops pronouns, so soy (not yo soy) is completely perfect while the English counterpart, I am, cannot drop the pronoun I. Due to sound change, the inherited forms would probably be e, only a single vowel that also happens to mean the conjunction and, and I am thankful that they did not.[9]

Such is life

Suppletion, a frightening obstacle to many language learners, ready to turn their enthusiasm into craziness, is also immensely cumbersome to memorise even to native speakers, who have a tendency to regularise these out-of-pattern forms. That is why, in Spanish, one says vamos ‘we go’ or ‘let us go’. In the past, imos used to be the unique way to mean ‘we go’, perfectly distinguishable from the cohortative vamos. I have no idea when it came to pass precisely, but Hispanophones became aware that there was something uncanny with how they conjugated the verb ir. They said vo ‘I go’, vas ‘thou goest’, and va ‘he goes’, but imos. What used to mean another thing now has replaced the old imos, which has become archaic, and Spanish speakers develop another form of ir that only signifies ‘let us go’, that is, vayamos, not as frequently used as vamos is, however.[10]

At the end of the day, native speakers are human beings. Irregularity becomes regularised, and suppletive forms becomes replaced by consistent ones. When they find it to be exorbitantly difficult to remember all these unexpected conjugated forms, they opt to switch to the ones that they think are easier. That is how every language works; it alternates in accordance to what its speakers need. If these alternations are inherited from generations to generations, they become part of the standard language, displacing what was the original ones. With the advance of communication technology and human interconnection, there will be inescapably as well as foreseeably an increasing number of regularisations taking place.

In my opinion, what we have now is to be preserved. Let us think of suppletive forms not as hindrances, but rather as ornaments that beautify our living languages. Behind every suppletion is a history, behind every history is human intention, and behind human intention is the continuous dynamics of our human society. As we have learnt erstwhile, there are several reasons leading to the replacement of certain forms of a lexeme, and we can see that suppletion happens if some forms are no longer perceived as comely to both the ears and the eyes — and sometimes, the real reason has been forgotten.

I concur that the process of remembering all these irregular, oftentimes radically different forms, is burdensome. I think, however, that it can help us to improve our cognitive skills — in this case, memorisation — and also, there are not that many irregularities in most languages. The vast majority of words have a predictable morphology, and the irregular forms are only retained because these words are frequently used in daily usage. Therefore, the sole way to master these linguistic barries is by practising every day, not hoping that one turns fluent out of the blue.

Personally, I enjoy learning suppletive forms, and if I were to choose between having a language with perfect regularity and a language with a high number of them, I would choose the latter one. They captivate me very, very much.

References

[1] Juge, M. L. (1999). On the Rise of Suppletion in Verbal Paradigms. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 25(1), 183–194. https://doi.org/10.3765/bls.v25i1.1195

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Even-Simkin, E., & Tobin, Y. (2013). The Regularity of the “Irregular” Verbs and Nouns in English. John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 238.

[5] Wełna, J. (2001). Suppletion for suppletion, or the replacement of ēode by went in English. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 36, 95–110. http://hdl.handle.net/10593/18337

[6] Bybee, J. L. (2015). Language Change. Cambridge University Press. hlm. 111.

[7] When to Use People vs. Persons. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster. Retrieved January 18, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/people-vs-persons

[8] Badudu, Y. (1984). Bahasa Indonesia: Anda Bertanya? Inilah Jawabnya [Indonesian: Do You Have Questions? Here Are the Answers]. Pustaka Prima. hlm. 101.

[9] Juge, M. L., On the Rise of Suppletion in Verbal Paradigms.

[10] Penny, R. J. (2009). A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 192.