Talk:Irregular verb
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[edit] bid
There's a verb missing from the list: "Bid", when used to mean "place an offer on an item up for auction" indeed has the declension bid/bid/bid. But "bid" when used to mean "wish or tell" can be conjugated bid/bade/bidden. How should we put this information in without being confusing?Matt gies 20:05, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
- Just write it write after "bid/bid/b" in a concise manner. There's plenty of space there to the right unused and wasted. --Menchi 22:19, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
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- I decided to do it in the same style as the rest of the list, putting variants next to each other separated by a forward slash. That way it doesn't disturb the visual coherence of the list. Matt gies 22:24, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
"Visual coherence"?! LOL!..... sorry, it wasn't a mockery, but that loooong list with the \ A/B/C style hardly seems beautiful either way: either as of now, with space used inefficiently, or have the "coherence" disrupted. Wikipedia is one of the ugliest big websites out there. There's no hope in it. Of course, the latest Main Page with pictures certainly improved. --Menchi 22:34, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I've added external links to what appear to me to be good lists of irregular verbs in various languages. If anyone knows better resources for these languages, or resources for other languages, please improve the list! -- Jmabel 04:03, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Number of irregular verbs in Latin
I rather doubt the assertion that Latin has more than 900 irregular verbs. The irregular verbs in Latin AFAIK are esse and its derivatives, posse, dare, êsse, ferre and its derivatives, velle and its derivatives, fieri, and ire and its derivatives.
It's true that Latin has many verbs whose principal parts must be learned separately, and cannot be derived from a single basic form. Almost all of the verbs outside the first conjugation are like this. You have to know, for example, that spopondi is the perfect stem of spondere, and that the past participle is sponsum. But once you have that data, the entire sequence can be reconstructed from it by rule; it is not "irregular". This strikes me more as a matter of lexicon than a matter of irregular verbs. If these make irregular verbs in Latin, how many more do Greek and Sanskrit have, where again you have the problem of not knowing what derivational suffixes go with what roots, which ones reduplicate, which ones take the augment, and so forth. Smerdis of Tlön 13:44, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- I took tht number from the article in the German-language Wikipedia. I don't have much knowledge of Latin, myself, only of modern Romance languages. Smerdis, you sound like you know whereof you speak. Could you edit the article accordingly, including a more thorough exposition of the issues you raise in the comment you just made. -- Jmabel 17:22, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- "Ire" is only considered an irregular verb more recently; it's only "irregularity" is the 1st person singular "eo" and the fact that its derivatives have "-ii" in the perfect tense instead of "ivi", which is a regular form. Truly it's about as irregular as "spondere". ~finlay, about midnight on Fri 21st May 2004 UTC
- I also think it's a bit hypocritical perhaps that the very verbs that require extra learning for the lexicon in English are considered irregular, yet the equivalents in Latin, which require three lexical stems as opposed to one, are not considered irregular. --Finlay 10:48, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Irregularity has to be determined within a language, rather than by comparison to other languages, I think. There are dozens of Spanish verbs that might become irregular because Spanish spellings require changes to the appearance of their roots; these are rule-bound, however, and can be reconstructed by rule among those familiar with Spanish spelling. If we counted these, the number of irregular verbs would be substantially boosted there as well. -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:48, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I also think it's a bit hypocritical perhaps that the very verbs that require extra learning for the lexicon in English are considered irregular, yet the equivalents in Latin, which require three lexical stems as opposed to one, are not considered irregular. --Finlay 10:48, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Irregular auxiliary verbs in Japanese
What are the two irregular auxiliary verbs in Japanese that the table mentions? -- pne 09:21, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- kureru has an irregular imperative form, kure, used especially in auxilary situations. aru has the irregular negative form nai, and again has many auxilary uses. (Although in Osaka dialect arahen is regular according to the rules of the dialect.) The five honorific verbs (irassharu, ossharu, kudasaru, gozaru, nasaru) are arguably irregular, but all conjugate similarly. Some of the single kanji + suru verbs like aisuru are slightly irregular, conjugating in some forms as though based off of aisu. For example, aiseru is used for the potential instead of ai-dekiru. Finally, shinu is arguably irregular, as it (along with verbs formed from another verb stem + shinu) is the only n-stem verb, but it conjugates in a very regular manner like other consonant-stem verbs. -- John Thacker 1 March 2005
[edit] Modals
Why were the English modals all removed from the list? VV 08:32, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Esperanto
- This has even been observed in languages constructed to not have exceptions. The few people who are native speakers of Esperanto have, after only one generation, been observed to use contractions that have created a group of irregular verbs.
Could we have a citation for this, please? - Montréalais 22:10, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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- I bet they say tas for estas. Chameleon 22:30, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- 'kay, but do they say something other than "tis, tos, tus, tu," etc? or do they just use the uncontracted forms? neither case would really be what's commonly thought of as an irregular verb. - Montréalais 23:05, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- If they only do it in the present, that would make an irregular verb. Chameleon 01:00, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
[edit] English
"English has 283 irregular verbs". Really? Where did we get this figure? It's spuriously accurate. You can't possibly give a figure because (1) many verbs have both regular and irregular forms, (2) some verbs are regular in one dialect (British or American) and irregular in the other, (3) some verbs have forms which are irregular but archaic, while other, now normally irregular verbs have archaic regular variants, (4) do you count "redo" as irregular, and if so, where do you stop? I noticed that our list of irregular verbs contains "redo" and several other "re-" words, but it by no means includes all of the "re-" and "mis-" irregulars which actually exist in the language. Basically, you simply can't give a figure. (unsigned)
- The history shows that I'm responsible for bringing this factoid over from the corresponding article in the German-language Wikipedia. While their scholarly standards are generally a notch up from the English-language, in this case it looks like they had no citation at all. It looks like it was in the initial version of the article, created by de:Benutzer:4tilden, a rathre active user. That would probably be the best person to ask for a source. I agree that the number suggests precision beyond any possible accuracy, but if it comes from a decent source, it's still worth something if a citation is added as to whose estimate it is. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:30, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)
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- And now I see someone has deleted the number for Spanish (23), arguing that it is way too low. Of course, it's all a matter of how irregular a verb has to be to be considered irregular: Spanish has a lot of slightly irregular verbs, often groupning into patterns that constitute a sort of secondary regularity.
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- I just counted the number of verbs included in the list of irregular and defective verbs in the Gramática de la Lengua Española de Emilio Alarcos Llorach, (1994) Real Academia Española, ISBN 84-239-7840-0 and he listed 615 irregular and defective verbs. I may be wrong in my counting a very few more or less, but Torrego, in his Gramática didáctica del español ISBN 84-348-5440-6 , also lists around 600 irregular verbs (honestly, I didn't count the list of Torrego so accurately as the other one). But, even when they both listed that amount of irregular verbs, as much as I have read, neither of them dare to assume and declare an exact number of irregular verbs in Spanish. Actually, I realized that both lists do not have exactly the same verbs. Besides, Torrego divides the Spanish verbs in 57 different conjugations, three of them regular, while Alarcos divides them into groups and subgroups depending on the kind of irregularities the verb have (phonological, graphic, accents, vocal deletion, irregularities on the root of the verb, especial irregularities (ser, estar e ir) and defective verbs. --Javier Carro 13:36, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
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- In his book Words and Rules, Steven Pinker reports 150 to 180 irregular verbs exist in modern English, "depending on how you count". -- Schaefer 20:29, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Irregular verbs borrowed into English
The article says "All English irregular verbs are native, originating in Old English. ... All loanwords from foreign languages are regular." I believe "shrive" is an exception, sort of - it's a borrowing from Latin scribere, but was already borrowed into Old English. Reuben 21:33, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
"sneak" looks as if it originated in Old English but the irregular "snuck" started in the 19th century. [1]. So I don't know if this is an exceprtion to the rule. Thincat 09:35, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- Dude. That is SO not funny. Matt Yeager 00:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Finnish
Perceivedly Finnish may have irregular verbs, but the underlying consonant assimilation pattern is used also elsewhere, such as to produce the potential mood, e.g. tul+ne+n → tullen cf. ol+ta → olla. Only the third person on "is" is irregular. Tehdä and nähdä are not irregular, the -h- is simply elided. --Vuo 8 July 2005 19:57 (UTC)
[edit] sui generis
WTF is "sui generis"? This quite possibly ranks as the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. What in the world is an obscure Latin (right?) term doing in an introduction in the English Wikipedia? I'm taking it out. If anyone objects, put it back with a translation (or, just the translated phrase). --Matt Yeager 01:11, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Welsh
The table says there are 11 irregular verbs in Welsh. What are they? bod, gwneud, mynd, dod, cael… what are the other six? It would be good to have this information in the table. 207.245.124.66 16:05, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
- ...or to have it in the Welsh language article, or one linked from there. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:14, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
- My guess is that it includes the -bod compounds like gwybod, adnabod, and others that have additional inflected tenses or otherwise partial stem changes like the ones seen in bod. I'll add a few things about them at Welsh morphology. Strad 02:13, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Yes Minister
The passage on Yes Minister seems only marginally relevant, and not written in a way that readily explains that relevance to someone not already familiar with the joke (especially because the example here isn't really a verb, it's a predicate). If someone can clean this up (and cite for it), great. Otherwise, it should be gone. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:16, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
It's been 5 days. No response. I have cut it. Here is the material, if someone wants to rework it:
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- Yes, Minister
- The phrase "irregular verb" was a running joke in the BBC television series, Yes Minister, that has entered popular culture. The phrase referred to an expression that changed from positive to negative connotation based on who was the reference of the verb.
- A common example of an "irregular verb" in this context is:
- I have an independent mind.
- You are an eccentric.
- He is round the twist.
-- Jmabel | Talk 06:12, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Irregular Verbs in Afrikaans
I disagree with the statement that there are only two irregular verbs in Afrikaans. I am aware of at least 4 irregular verbs in Afrikaans: wees (Pres. is, Pret. was, P.Part. gewees); hê (Pres. het, Pret. had, P.Part. gehad); weet (Pres. weet, Pret. wis, P.Part. geweet); and dink (Pres. dink, Pret. dag, P.Part gedag or gedog). In addition, the 4 Germanic modal verbs also have irregular preterite forms in Afrikaans (kan/kon, moet/moes, sal/sou, wil/wou). Finally, it should be mentioned that, although the irregular past participle forms of common strong German verbs are no longer used in modern Afrikaans, they are retained however when those participles are used as adjectives, for example, "ek het 'n brief geskryf" (I have written/wrote a letter), but "'n geskrewe brief" ("a written letter"). 161.24.19.82 20:42, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Number of Irregular Verbs in Italian and Spanish
The number of irregular verbs mentioned in the table for the Romance languages looks suspicious to me. It is well-known that Italian and French have more irregular verbs than, let's say Spanish and Portuguese, but does Italian really have 10 times more irregular verbs than Spanish ? Incidentally, the number of true irregular verbs in Spanish is probably less than 46.
- In Portuguese (which is quite similar to Spanish), there are AFAIK only 16 major irregular verbs which, together with their more numerous compounds, are either anomalous or at least show stem changes in their preterite/pluperfect/past subjunctive/future subjunctive forms. There are also perhaps some 20 or so additional model verbs that have either irregular (i.e. unpredictible) stem changes or irregular conjugation in the present tense only (e.g "perco"/"perde", "meço"/"mede", "saio/sai/saem" "fujo"/"foge","subo"/"sobe", "leio"/"lê", "peço/"pede", "ouço"/"ouve", "odeio/odiamos", "ceio/ceamos", "destruo"/"destrói", "agrido/agride/agredimos", and so on). There is however a somewhat wider class of Portuguese verbs with irregular past participle forms (e.g. "preso", "aceso", "eleito", "morto","entregue", "impresso", "suspenso", and so on). However, with only a few exceptions like e.g. "dito", "feito", "aberto", "coberto", "visto", "escrito", "posto", all remaining irregular past participles are used only in passive voice constructions (e.g. "foi preso" x "tinha prendido") or when nominalized as adjectives (see comments on Afrikaans above).161.24.19.82 21:21, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
- Well, it all depends...on how you count verbs, and on what you count as irregular. Do tener, detener, obtener, contener etc. count as one irregular verb (they all contain--no pun--'tener', and conjugate exactly like the bare verb tener)? (These are perhaps what you mean by 'compounds' in Portuguese.)
- As for whether any given verb is irregular, that also is open to dispute. Basically, the issue is whether you count some set of verbs that conjugate all in the same way, as another (perhaps small) conjugation class, or as a set of irregular verbs.
- For example, Spanish has a verb buscar; the root is always phonemically /busk/, but that is spelled 'busc' when it comes before a back vowel, and 'busque' when it comes before a front vowel. Is that an irregularity? It's completely predictable, but it's also listed in the U of Chicago dictionary as irregular.
- Or take the diphthongizing verbs, like dormir. The 'o' changes to 'ue' (and this is a change in the pronunciation, not just the spelling) when it is stressed. Stress on verbs is predictable. So are verbs like this irregular, or just a small conjugation class? Traditionally, it's treated as the former (possibly because the conjugation classes are traditionally based on the suffixes, not on stem changes).
- I think the summary of this is, there is no clear and universally agreed-on definition of what counts for irregularity. And therefore there can be no such thing as a clear and agreed-on number of irregular verbs (or nouns, or adjectives etc.) in any language (unless it's zero). This is somewhat reflected in the disclaimer at the top of the table, but some of the counts (924) belie this.
- 128.8.89.68 20:08, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Irregular verbs in Turkish
Could someone who has the knowledge please post an opinion on whether there actually are any irregular verbs in Turkish or not? Some people who study the language told me that there was one such a verb - "olmak" = "to be" - so I am puzzled about this. Google gives pages for both possibilities, though mentions of no irregular verbs in the language are more frequent there. Plus, the Guiness Book of records mentions Esperanto as the only language with no irregular verbs, which would make it impossible for Turkish to have no irregular verb as well (though I think the Guiness-entry may easily be challenged). Blahma 08:40, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Punning irregular verbs
Some reference to this humorous group should be made - the most well known example is 'I am firm, you are obstinate, he/she is as stubborn as a mule' - ie positive and two increasingly negative terms. Jackiespeel 21:42, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] 350 irregular verbs in Dutch?!
There aren't that many irregular verbs in Dutch. Most strong verbs follow predictable patterns in their vowel changes. As there seem to be rules for this, I don't think you can say they are irregular.
I got this list of patterns from the ANS (Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst), which mentions them (though I've removed the lists of verbs from in between the patterns).
1 ij ee ee ee 2 ei ee ee ee 3 ie oo oo oo 4 ui oo oo oo 5 ee oo oo oo 6 i o o o 7 e o o o 8 aa oe oe aa 9 aa ie ie aa 10 a ie ie a 11 a i i a 12 oo ie ie oo 13 o e e o 14 oe ie ie oe 15 ouw ieuw ieuw ouw 16 uu oo oo oo 17 ij oo oo oo 18 e ie ie o 19 e ie ie aa 20 ee oe oe oo 21 ee a aa ee 22 ee a aa oo 23 i a aa ee
The ANS also lists the verbs that do not follow these patterns, but of these there are only 55 (unless I've miscounted, but it won't be far off) instead of the claimed 350.
