Education and Reference Q&A
Why are irregular verbs irregular?
Answers: Not satisfactory roughage.
In contrast to nearly everyone else, I'm actually going to answer the question.
Irregular verbs are made so by usage. If you look at irregular verbs, they are the ones that are (or, historically, were) used the most. For example, the verbs "to be" and "to have" are irregular surrounded by virtually every language.
All words change over time, but the ones that are used most will procure changed the most quickly.
Incidentally, verbs like "to take", which transfer the internal vowel, and have a past participle culmination in "-en", are not irregular, although they're commonly referred to as such. They're simply a different conjugation. They're known as "strong" verbs, and we find them from German. In fact, because English was originally German (Saxon), and be only influenced later by other language like French, you could argue that they are the regular verbs, and the others are irregular. (But we don't, of course.)
Basically, irregularity surrounded by verbs is a form of corruption, which happens in adjectives words in all language, to a greater or lesser degree. Generally, the commonest words take corrupted the most.
In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation contained by the languages in which they take place.
What counts as an irregular verb is strongly dependent on the language itself. In English, the surviving strong verbs are considered irregular. In Old English, by contrast, the strong verbs are usually not considered irregular, at least not simply by virtue of being strong verbs: within were several recognized classes of strong verbs, which be regular within themselves.
In Latin, similarly, most verbs outside the first or fourth conjugations have three principal parts, which form element of the lexicon and must be learned. The three principal parts are the present strung out stem, the perfect tense stem, and times gone by participle; a variety of inflections, ablaut, and sometimes reduplication are used to form these parts. For example, the principal parts of spondeō ("I promise") include spondēre ("to promise"), spopondī ("I promised"), showing reduplication, and sponsus ("promised"); these forms cannot be predicted from the present stem, but when you know all four, the entire system can be constructed from these three parts by rule. This verb is not usually considered irregular contained by Latin. Latin also exhibits deponent verbs, inflected in the passive voice alone; and defective verbs, missing some principal parts. Truly irregular verbs surrounded by Latin are a rather small class; they include esse ("to be"); dare and its derivatives ("to give"); edere ("to eat"); ferre and its derivatives ("to carry"); velle and its derivatives ("to wish"); ire and its derivatives ("to go"); fieri ("to become")and malle ("to prefer"). Most irregular Latin verbs are themselves vestiges of the athematic conjugations of Indo-European, a surviving (and regular) group found in Greek.
The English verbal skill has a large number of irregular verbs. In the great majority of these, times gone by participle and/or past tense is not formed according to the usual pattern of English regular verbs. Other parts of the verb — such as the present 3rd person singular -s or -es, and present participle -ing — may still be formed regularly.
Among the exceptions are the verb to be and certain defective verbs which cannot be conjugated into particular tenses.
Most English irregular verbs are native, originating within Old English (an exception being 'catch' from Old North French 'cachier'.) They also tend to be the most commonly used verbs. The ten most commonly used verbs in English are adjectives irregular.
Steven Pinker's book Words and Rules discusses how mistakes made by children in learning irregular verbs throw bedside light on the mental processes involved in language attainment.
All loanwords from foreign languages are regular. So are verbs that have be recently coined and all nouns used as verbs use standard suffixes. Almost adjectives of the least commonly used words are also regular, even though some of them may have be irregular in the past.
[edit] Origin
Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems. What is today an exception in reality 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 past the Great Vowel Shift fell into a class of words where the vowel in hold on to (then pronounced kehp) was shortened in olden times 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 the vowel shift call ablaut and sometimes have a past participle within -en or -n: e.g., ride/rode/ridden. This verb group was inherited from the parent Proto-Germanic dialect, and ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European language, and was originally an entirely regular system. In Old English and within modern German it is still more or less regular, but in modern English the system of strong verb classes have almost entirely collapsed. For the history of these, see the article Germanic strong verb.
Weak verbs that have been subjected to nouns changes over the course of the history of English that have rendered them irregular. Many of these acquire a long vowel in the present stem, but kept a short vowel in the preterite and ancient participle; e.g., hear/heard/heard.
Weak verbs that show the vowel shift are sometimes called "Rückumlaut" in the present on edge e.g. think/thought. On these, see the articles Germanic umlaut and Germanic weak verb.
Weak verbs that end contained by a final -t or -d that made the addition of the weak suffix -ed come across 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 be once a large Indo-European class of verbs that were conjugated surrounded by the preterite or perfect tense near present tense meaning. All of the surviving verbs of this class are modal verbs, i.e., a class of 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 (where went is originally from the verb to wend). On the history of their paradigms, see: go (verb) and Indo-European copula.
Other verbs hold 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 peculiarity 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 have a regular conjugation with a [d] pronunciation).
Weak verbs that have be the subject of contractions; e.g., have/had/had.
They were not made that way on purpose. The words which are irregular are all commonly used and have be in the language for a long time. In some cases, elder forms of the words have survived (English grammar have gone through changes).
Wikipedia has a good article in the order of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irr...
Most irregular verbs come from Latin and those are irregular because they come from a different language. Some are greek, while others come from other, now extinct, indo-european language. I seem to recall that various of the internally changing irregular verbs come from Old Saxon, from which English is derived.
A verb in which times gone by tense is not formed by adding the usual -ed closing moments. Examples of irregular verbs are sing (past tense sang); feel (felt); and travel (went). (Compare regular verb.)
http://www.answers.com/irregular%20verb
any verb whose past tense and historic participle are not formed by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the present tense, a verb that does not follow the broad rules of inflection
A verb in which the past worried is not formed by adding the usual -ed ending. Examples of irregular verbs are sing (past stressed sang); feel (felt); and go (went).
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q...
They were the reject verbs...no.
For example you can't right to be heard I feeled the dog because feeled isn't a real word unless you're a two year old erudition to talk.
You would have to influence I felt because Irregular Verbs provide other endings of words besides ed because Regular Verbs one and only end in ed.
Hope that help ya.
Answers above probably cover this. I learnt more about them when I tried to numeral the following. If you are one person (singular) named John why do we read aloud 'you ARE' and not 'you IS'? We say John 'is' not John 'are' yet we utter 'you (John) are'. So that's because 'you are' contains an irregular verb.
they werent made deliberately
when languages evolved from ancient language like latin some followed a regular pattern while others be just made different for convenience or had different roots. but we get hold of the expression observing retrospectively
To make language more confusing IMO, espically French.
'Cuz they're just cool like that.
because they're not regular and the prefix ir- channel not.
more confusionnnnnnn!!
to make life more difficult i suppose! :)
