| Irregular Verb |
Article Index for Irregular |
Shopping Irregular |
Information AboutIrregular Verb |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT IRREGULAR VERB | |
| verb types | |
|
What counts as an irregular verb is strongly dependent on the language itself. In English , the surviving Strong Verb s are considered irregular. In Old English , by contrast, the strong verbs are usually not considered irregular, at least not only by virtue of being strong verbs: there were several recognised classes of strong verbs, which were regular within themselves. In Latin , similarly, most verbs outside the first or fourth Conjugation s have three Principal Parts , which form part of the Lexicon and must be learned. The three principal parts are the Present Tense stem, the Perfect Tense stem, and the Past Participle ; a variety of inflections, Ablaut , and sometimes Reduplication are used to form these parts. For example, the principal parts of ''spondeo'' ("I promise") include ''spopondi'' ("I promised"), showing reduplication, and ''sponsus'' ("promised"); these forms cannot be predicted from the present stem, but when you know all three, the entire system can be constructed from these three parts by rule. This verb is not usually considered irregular in Latin. Latin also exhibits Deponent Verb s, inflected in the Passive Voice alone; and Defective Verb s, missing some principal parts. Truly irregular verbs in Latin are a rather small class; they include ''esse'' ("to be"); ''dare'' and its derivatives ("to give"); ''êsse'' ("to eat"); ''ferre'' and its derivatives ("to carry"); ''velle'' and its derivatives ("to wish"); ''ire'' and its derivatives ("to go"); and ''fieri'' ("to become"). Most irregular Latin verbs are themselves vestiges of the Athematic conjugations of Indo-European , a surviving (and regular) group found in Greek . Greek and Sanskrit show even greater complexities, with widely different Thematic and athematic inflection sets; which set goes with which verb stem cannot be predicted by rule. In languages of this type, these variations are not usually enough to label a verb "irregular". They instead form a part of the Lexicon ; when a verb is learned, the various patterns used to conjugate it must also be learned. By contrast, in Modern English , the strong verbs are largely a closed and vestigial class. ( Analogy has created a few new strong verbs, such as ''dive''.) All of the surviving strong verbs differ markedly from other verbs, and thus are classified as "irregular"; here, they are conspicuous exceptions in the midst of a much larger class of rule-bound regular verbs. In some languages, the count of irregular verbs could be greatly expanded if one were to count verbs that are irregular only in their spelling, but not in their pronunciation. For example, in Spanish , the verb ''rezar'' ("to pray") is conjugated in the present subjunctive as ''rece'', ''reces'', ''rece'', etc. The substitution of ''c'' for ''z'' does not affect the pronunciation. It is strictly a matter of Orthography . Therefore, this verb is not normally considered irregular. Other issues affecting the count of irregular verbs in various languages are:
NUMBER OF IRREGULAR VERBS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES While the term "irregular verb" is not precisely enough defined to allow a definitive count of the irregular verbs in all languages, the following table is illustrative of how much this phenomenon varies across languages. SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|