May 3, 2010

Regular Verbs

Before 9th grade French class, I'd never heard of regular verbs. Then I realized I didn't know if English had any.

Apparently we do, and they actually look pretty easy to conjugate, considering the present tense form is only different for he/she/it, the past tense is all the same, and everything else takes an auxiliary and a participle. Not too bad; in French and Arabic you have to conjugate a little more based on 1st/2nd/3rd person and singular/plural, at least in present and past tense.

On the other hand, English has a lot of irregular verbs, and you can't tell from the word itself whether or not it's regular.

In French, if the infinitive ends with -er, -ir, or -re, it's usually regular. French also has some semi-regular verb families, like the -uire verbs and variants of mettre and venir (both of which are exceptions to the infinitive endings).

In Arabic, there are six truly irregular verbs; the rest belong to families of semi-regulars, and you should be able to tell them by doubled letters or weak consonants in the root. (I could be wrong here; I'm summarizing something I don't know well and read about on the internet.)

In English, you just have to know the verb. We don't have endings to the infinitive that tell us it's irregular, like French usually will, and there aren't specific patterns with the roots like in Arabic. This'd be OK enough--if we didn't have so many irregulars.

Yeah, Sodom and Gomorrah may be in the nice, green part of the country, but you have to pay for it with a little flaming sulfur.

A nice list of regular verbs.

A not-so-nice list of irregular verbs.
A fun verb conjugator.
A useful explanation of irregular verbs in Arabic, if you're such a masochist that you really want to know.

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