The Irregular verb reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
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Irregular verb

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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. They mostly exist as remnants of historical conjugations.

Table of contents
1 The number of irregular verbs in various languages
2 English Irregular verbs
3 External links

The number of irregular verbs in various 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.

Language Count Notes
English 283 Believed to be the most irregular verbs of any widely spoken contemporary language
German 170  
French 81 External link to list of irregular French verbs
Spanish 23 External link to list of irregular Spanish verbs
Welsh 11  
Japanese 2 There are also two irregular helping verbs
Turkish 0  
Esperanto 0 (like most constructed languages)

What counts as an irregular verb is strongly dependent on the language itself. In English, the surviving strong verbs are considered irregular, largely because they are sui generis. 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 conjugations 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 verbs, inflected in the passive voice alone; and defective verbs, 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"); volo 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:

English Irregular verbs

The irregularity of English verbs refers to its inconsistency in forming predictable past participles and/or past tenses. For all irregular verbs beside to be and defective 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.

English irregular verbs are native; they originate in Old English. In contrast, loanwords are regular. However, not all native English verbs are irregular.

There are about 250 irregular English verbs, and they can be classified in a number of different ways:

There are fewer strong verbs and irregular verbs in modern English than there were in Old English. The force of analogy tends to reduce the number of irregular verbs over time. 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 include:

List of irregular English verbs

The present tense comes first, next the preterite, and the past participle comes last:

External links