 |
Under Constructions - Still trying to get the donkey!
In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur.
English Irregular verbs
English has 283 irregular verbs, believed to be the most of any widely
spoken contemporary language.
Almost all irregular English verbs do not conform to standard methods of forming past participles and/or past tenses. With these verbs other conjunctions and inflections — such as the present 3rd person singular -s or -es,
and present participle -ing — broadly follow the same rules of spelling as the regular verbs.
The exceptions are the verb to be and also defective verbs which cannot be conjugated into certain tenses.
All English irregular verbs are native, originating in Old English. They also tend to be the most commonly used verbs. The ten most commonly used verbs in English are all irregular.
Steven Pinker's book Words and Rules discusses how mistakes made by children in learning irregular verbs throw light on the mental
processes involved in language acquisition.
All loanwords from foreign languages are regular. So are verbs that
have been recently coined and all nouns used as verbs use standard suffixes. Almost all of the least commonly used words are
also regular, even though some of them may have been irregular in the past.
Formation of irregular verbs
Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems.
What is today an exception actually followed a set, normal rule long ago. When that rule fell into disuse, some verbs kept
the old conjugation. An example of this is the word kept, which before the Great Vowel Shift fell into a class of words where the vowel in keep (then pronounced kehp) was shortened in the past tense. Similar
words, such as peep, that arose after the Vowel Shift, use the regular -ed suffix. Groups of irregular verbs include:
- The remaining strong verbs, which display ablaut among their several tenses; e.g., ride/rode/ridden. These verbs are inherited from the parent Germanic language, and ultimately, from Indo-European. Many strong verbs have a past participle in -en or -n rather than -ed.
- Weak verbs that have been subjected to sound changes over the course of the history of English that have rendered them irregular. Many
of these acquired a long vowel in the present stem, but kept a short vowel in the preterite and past participle; e.g., hear/heard/heard.
- Weak verbs that end in a final -t or
-d that made the addition of the weak suffix -ed seem redundant; e.g., cost/cost/cost.
- A handful of surviving preterite-present verbs. These can be distinguished from the rest because their third person simple present singular (the he, she, or it
form) does not take a final -s. These are the remnants of what was once a fairly large Indo-European class of verbs
that were conjugated in the preterite or perfect tense with present tense meaning. All of the surviving verbs of this class are auxiliary verbs or quasi-auxiliaries; e.g., can/could/could.
- Verbs that contain suppletive forms, which form one or more of their tenses from an entirely different root. Be is one of these, as is go/went/gone.
Other than historical legacy, other irregular verbs have been changed
due to ease of pronunciation so that it is shorter or more closely corresponds to how it is spelt.
- A number of verbs whose irregularity is chiefly
due to the peculiarities of English spelling; e.g., lay/laid/laid.
- Past tense ending -ed written phonetically
when devoiced to -t; e.g., burn/burnt/burnt (which also has a regular conjugation with a [d] pronunciation).
- Weak verbs that have been the subject of contractions;
e.g., have/had/had.
There are fewer strong verbs and irregular verbs in modern English than
there were in Old English. Slowly over time the number of irregular verbs is decreasing. The force of analogy tends to reduce the number of irregular verbs over time. This fact explains why irregular verbs tend to be the most commonly
used ones, verbs that are more rarely heard are more likely to switch to being regular. For instance, a verb like ablate
was once irregular but today ablated is the standard usage. Today irregular and standard forms often coexist, a sign
that the irregular form may be on the wane. For instance, seeing spelled instead of spelt or strived
instead of strove is common.
On the other hand, contraction and sound changes can increase their number. Most of the strong verbs were regular, in that they fell into a conventional
plan of conjugation, in Old English; there are so few of them left in contemporary English that they seem irregular to us.
Common irregularities
Common irregularities include:
- Change whatever existing vowel to [O], orthographically
represented by ou or au, e.g.
- beseech → besought
- bring → brought
- buy → bought
- catch → caught
- seek → sought
- teach → taught
- think → thought
- Change whatever existing vowel to [oU] or [@U]
(depending which dialect is spoken), orthographically represented by o with a word-final e, e.g.
- break → broke
- choose → chose
- freeze → froze
- speak → spoke
- steal → stole
Then, to form past
participle, add nasal suffix -en, e.g., broke → broken
- No change, e.g., bet, bid, burst, cast, cost,
cut, fit, hit, hurt, knit, let, put, quit, rid, set, shed, shit (can also be "shat" in the past tense), shut, split, spread,
sweat, thrust, wed, wet.
List of irregular English verbs
The present tense comes first, next the preterite, and the past participle comes last:
|
|
