Go (verb)
The verb go is highly irregular, and is the only suppletive verb in English apart from be.
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Principal parts
Go's principal parts are go, went, and gone. The past participle gone is not nearly as irregular as the preterit, (or 'simple past tense'), went; at least gone is related to the infinitive go. Went, is in no way etymologically related to go, for Went comes from wendan in Old English, which is also the source of wend. Old English wendan and gan (the latter of which means go) did share semantic similarities, and their similar meanings can be seen in the fact that the sentence "I'm wending my way home", means "I'm going home."
Two irregular preterits
However, went is only the second irregular preterit that go has had throughout its history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), go originally existed only in the present stem; thus, all past forms, such as preterits or past participial forms are later additions or modifications. Before adopting went as a preterit, go (then gan) used ēode. The following table reproduces gan conjugated in preterit, using its first preterit, ēode. Translated into Modern English, this table reads "I went; thou wentst; he went; we went; you went; they went".
The Old English preterit
| Gan preterit | |
| ic — ēode | wē — ēodon |
| þū — ēodes; ēodest | gē — ēodon |
| hē — ēode | hīo — ēodon |
Origin of ēode
When one looks at ēode, in all its conjugated forms, it is not surprising to see all the –d's, for these are the familiar Germanic dental suffixes, establishing ēode as a preterit. The root itself ēo came from the unattested Proto-Germanic *ijjôm. (The Gothic form of this root is iddja) *Ijjôm was itself a past tense form of the Proto Indo-European (PIE) root *yâ (go). Specifically, this root was it was either imperfect or aorist. (The aorist aspect expressed momentary action in the past, while the imperfect, continual action in the past). *Yâ itself seems to have come from a PIE form *ei, î, and if this is correct, it would establish a link between the Old English Preterit for go and the Latin īre (go, pres inf.) (which is simply the î from *ei, î followed by a standard Latin infinitive ending, –re). The OED does not discuss this, but the 4th Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary does in its appendix of PIE stems, drawing heavily on Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (page 293). (īre is the source of many English words, words as disparate as introit, preterit, and ambition).
Development of a new preterit
Returning to the etymology of go, our now-familiar ēode became, in ME, variously ȝede, yede, and yode. By the 15th century in southern England, wende (wend) had become synonymous with go, but its infinitive and present tense forms had ceased to be in frequent use. With a waning, morphing preterit tense (yode), go was ripe to receive a new preterit -- the preterit of wende, the familiar went. In Scotland and in the dialects of northern England, yede was also replaced, but by gaed, which was produced by adding a regular dental suffix to the regional variant of go. Went made it into Standard English because southern England was to become the politically, culturally and economically central region of England in modern British history. However, a writer of no less importance than Spencer used yede to mean go in some instances, with its preterit form of yode but this was dialectical.
Etymology of wend
Wend (the source of go's current preterit) came from wendan. Wendan is thought, on the basis of numerous Germanic cognates, (particularly Gothic wandjan), to have come from the PIE root *wand. This root would be the preterit stem of windan. The relationship between windan and wendan needs to be briefly addressed.
Windan and wenden's relationship
The original form from which we get went is windan, which had wendan as a preterit stem, which in turn gave us went. Windan is not surprisingly the source of the modern verb, wind, (whose preterit and past participle is wound.) The original preterit of windan was *wand-, and windan had a causative form, wendan (meaning "to cause to wind", or "to cause to become wound"). So, went is derived from wendan, which is itself derived from windan. Let us now investigate the etymology of windan.
Origins of windan
The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for wand simply states that words like wend, wind, wand, and wander all have a common PIE root, and that this root is related to the idea of turning. (note that – wand originally meant a supple switch, not a stiff rod, and is related to the word from which whip is derived. The most important IE root (found in Pokorny 3. *er- 1152.) is treated in one of the American Heritage Dictionary's etymological indices under *wer-2. Though this root also carries with it the idea of turning, none of its English descendants are the words for which we are looking. Many turning-related words do come from *wer-2 (which Pokorny calls er-). For instance, we have wrist, wreath, writhe, (all of which involve turning), wring, wrench, and worm are only the most obvious descendants of this root. So, all we can say is that wind is derived from a similar PIE root to *wer-2.
The root *w- presupposed turning or motion, and was probably used both transatively and intransitively. Though originally wend meant to cause to wind (and the winding often being done in an intransitive sense), due to the similarity of these two words, they have been confused for at least a thousand years, and have thus influenced each other's developments. For much of their histories, wend and wind have had the sense of going, and thus it is not surprising that wend eventually came to have the sense of go.
Origins of the infinitive
*Ghê- is the PIE root from which go comes. It had the sense of "To release, let go; to be released; to go (but in the middle voice). From *ghê, comes Old English gân (to go) and German gehen (which is relatively regular, compared to English go). Though the 1st person present indicative for go in Old English was gá, aside from an unsurprising shift from an a to an o, there has been little change in the infinitive form of this word for its entire history. It is rare for such a common word to undergo so few changes over such a long history.
Origins of the past participle
The case of gone is a little more difficult. The Old English past participle was egán,but in order to understand fully the history of the pa. pple. we need to look at the now obsolete English verb, gang. Gang means "to walk" or "to go", and is possibly the source of the past participles gone and Germ. gegangen (which means gone). According to this theory, the preterit of a form of gang eventually became past participles in English, German, and other related languages. The question arises of the relationship between gang and gân. The OED proposes five theories. Needless to say, there is little consensus. There is one theory, that if true, would be fascinating. Kluge has contended that *ga-îm is the source of both go and gone, and that the î comes from the PIE root *ei-, which, as previously noted, is the source of Latin îre. It would be fascinating if this were true, but it is but one of many theories that have been presented, and there is no scholarly consensus. One interesting theory is that gone and gegangen are both nasalized reduplications of ghê-, and another is that the relationship of stand and stay influenced go and gone very early on.
Summary of the main PIE roots
Thus, we see that go (historically, anyway) is derived from at least 3 PIE roots: *ghê (from which we get go, and possibly gone), *ei, î, the source of éonde, and a root beginning in *w- from which we eventually get went, through windan and then wendan. We only use two of the derivatives of these roots today, go and went.
References
- The Online Etymology Dictionary
- The Oxford English Dictionary
- The Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
- The American Heritage Dictionary's PIE roots index.