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Portuguese has a strange coincidence in the preterit perfect tense of the verbs ir (to go) and ser (to be): they are conjugated exactly equally.

Portuguese — English to go | English to be

  • Eu fui — I went | was
  • Tu foste — You (singular) went | were

  • Ele/Ela foi — He/She went | was

  • Nós fomos — We went | were

  • Vós fostes — You (formal / plural (outdated)) went | were
  • Eles/Elas foram — They (masculine/feminine) went | were

What is the name of this verb conjugation convergence phenomenon? Do you know more examples of it occurring in any language?

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  • I don't understand your question. Do you mean that the two verbs have exactly the same forms for this tense?
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 1:01
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    Same thing in Spanish. The preterite (old Latin perfect) forms of both ser and ir are: fui, fuiste, fue, fuimos, fueron. The perfect of ire (ii, iiste, ivit,) must have died out, and the perfect form of esse (fui, fuiste, fuit,_) took over.
    – jlawler
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 2:26
  • @curiousdannii: Yes, it is exactly that.
    – sergiol
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 8:29
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    @jlawler "in a different ablaut grade" -- not really; this PIE root appears only to have existed in the zero grade (*bhuH). Fio appears to be a derivative in -ye/o- (*bhUh-ye/o-).
    – TKR
    Commented Jun 15, 2016 at 23:35
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    Other examples: Asturian has the ser/dir (to be/to go) overlap in preterite and derived forms, but also has tar/tener (to be/to have; tuvi, tuvisti...) sharing in preterite and derived. In the potential mood, dir/dicir (to go/to tell; diré, dirás...) also overlap.
    – user0721090601
    Commented Jun 16, 2016 at 17:12

3 Answers 3

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Corbett calls this (in Spanish) overlapping suppletion in his 2007 paper in Language. Stump is credited with the term heteroclisis (see Maiden (2009)).

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    "overlapping suppletion" could be translated to Portuguese with something as "Supletismo por sobreposição"
    – sergiol
    Commented Sep 10, 2014 at 8:49
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Corbett's 2007 paper attributes the term "overlapping suppletion" to Juge (1999). Juge, Matthew L. 1999. On the rise of suppletion in verbal paradigms. Berkeley Linguistics Society 25.183–94.

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Another example in another language (English):

English "go" and "wend" share the same past, although Dictionary.com & Amer. Heritage say the past of "wend" is now "wended", and "went" is archaic:

I went; (thou wentest); he/she/it went; we went; you went; they went

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