Talk:Irregular verb

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)

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)

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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)

Contents

1 Number of irregular verbs in Latin 2 Irregular auxiliary verbs in Japanese 3 Modals 4 Esperanto 5 English 6 Irregular verbs borrowed into English

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)

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)

Presumably kuru and suru. VV 08:32, 29 Sep 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

Modals

Why were the English modals all removed from the list? VV 08:32, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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.

Could someone get some numbers from citable sources? The actual number of irregular verbs in a language is, inevitably, controversial, but the number counted by a particular linguist with a particular methodology is not. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:55, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)

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)

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)

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] (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=sneak). So I don't know if this is an exceprtion to the rule. Thincat 09:35, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)