The
English language has a large number of
irregular verbs. In the great majority of these, the
past participle and/or
past tense is not formed according to the usual patterns of
English regular verbs. Other parts of the verb, such as the present
third person singular -s or -es, and the present
participle -ing, can still be formed regularly.
Among the exceptions are the verb to be and certain
defective verbs that cannot be conjugated into some tenses.
Most English irregular verbs are native, originating in
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 all irregular.
Steven Pinker's book
Words and Rules describes how mistakes made by children in
learning irregular verbs throw light on the
mental processes involved in
language acquisition.
Nearly all loan-words from foreign languages are regular, as are
verbs that have been recently coined, and all nouns used as verbs have
the standard suffixes. Nearly all of the least-commonly used words are
also regular, even though some of them may have been irregular in the
past.
Origin
Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation
systems. What is today an exception actually 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 before
the
Great Vowel Shift fell into a class of words in which the vowel in
keep (then pronounced kehp) was shortened in the past 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 called
ablaut, and which sometimes have their
past participles end in -en or -n: e.g.,
ride/rode/ridden.This verb group was inherited from the parent
Proto-Germanic language, and before that from the
Proto-Indo-European language. This was originally a system of
regular verbs. In
Old English, and still in modern
German, this system is more or less regular, but in Modern
English the system of strong verb classes has nearly vanished. For
the history of these verbs, see the article
Germanic strong verb.
-
Weak verbs that have been subjected to sound changes over the
course of the history of English that have rendered them irregular.
Many of these acquired a long
vowel
in their present-tense stems, but they kept the short vowel in the
preterite and the past participle - for example, in
hear/heard/heard.
- Weak verbs that show the vowel shift are sometimes called
"Rückumlaut" in the present tense e.g. think/thought. For
these, see the articles
Germanic umlaut and
Germanic weak verb.
- Weak verbs that end in a final -t or -d that made
the addition of the weak suffix -ed seem redundant - for
example, in cost/cost/cost and burst/burst/burst.
- 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 was once a large Indo-European class of verbs that
were conjugated in the preterite or
perfect forms with
present tense meaning. All of the surviving verbs of this class
are
modal verbs. These are a class of
auxiliary verbs or quasi-auxiliaries; e.g., can/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). For the history of
their paradigms, see:
go (verb) and
Indo-European copula.
Other verbs have been changed due to ease of pronunciation so that it
is shorter or more closely corresponds to how it is spelled.
- A number of verbs whose irregularity is chiefly due to the
peculiarities 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 has a
regular conjugation with a [d] pronunciation - "burned").
- Weak verbs that have been the subject of contractions, for
example - have/had/had.
There are fewer strong verbs and irregular verbs in Modern English
than there were in
Old English. Slowly the number of irregular verbs is decreasing. The
force of
analogy tends to reduce the number of irregular verbs over time.
This fact explains the reason that irregular verbs tend to be the most
commonly used ones. Verbs that are more rarely heard are more likely to
switch to being regular verbs. For instance, the verb chide was
once irregular (chid), but today chided is the standard
usage. Today irregular and standard forms often coexist, a sign that the
irregular form might be on the wane. For instance, seeing spelled
instead of spelt or strived instead of strove is
very common.
On the other hand,
contraction and sound changes can increase the number of irregular
verbs. 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
these left in Modern English that they can seem to be irregular.
In common with most Indo-European languages, the most common English
verbs such as to be, to go, to do, and to have
are quite irregular. Many of these also have pronunciations that are not
predictable from their spelling.
- be (pronounced
/biː/)
- Present: 1sg am (/æm/),
3sg is (/ɪz/),
others are (/ɑr/)
- Past: 1sg, 3sg was (/wʌz/),
others were (/wɜr/)
- Past participle: been (/bɪn/)
- go (/ɡoʊ/)
- Present: 3sg goes
- Past: went
- Past participle: gone (/ɡɒn/)
- do (/duː/)
- Present: 3sg does (/dʌz/)
- Past: did (/dɪd/)
- Past participle: done (/dʌn/)
- have (/hæv/)
- Present: 3sg has (/hæz/)
- Past: had (/hæd/)
- Past participle: had (/hæd/)
- say (/seɪ/)
- Present: 3sg says (/sɛz/)
- Past: said (/sɛd/)
- Past participle: said
Common patterns of irregularity in the past tense include:
- Change the vowel to
ɔː (the
THOUGHT vowel), orthographically represented by ough
or augh, e.g.,
- Present bring → Past, past participle brought
- buy → bought
- catch → caught
- seek → sought
- teach → taught
- think → thought
- Change the vowel to
oʊ (the GOAT vowel or "long O"),
orthographically represented by o with a word-final e,
e.g.,
- Present break → Past broke, Past participle
broken
- choose → chose, chosen
- freeze → froze, frozen
- speak → spoke, spoken
- steal → stole, stolen
- No change, e.g.,
- Present bet → Past, past participle bet
- bid → bid
- broadcast → broadcast
- burst → burst
- cast → cast
- cost → cost
- cut → cut
- fit → fit (esp.
U.S.)
- hit → hit
- hurt → hurt
- knit → knit
- let → let
- put → put
- quit → quit / quited → quited
- rid → rid
- set → set
- shed → shed
- shut → shut
- slit → slit
- split → split
- spread → spread
- thrust → thrust
- wet → wet
Note that broadcasted is also acceptable as the past
participle and past simple of the verb broadcast, especially in
the technical meanings.[1]