# Irregular verbs: key verbs?



## ThomasK

Could one say that the key verbs in a language are very often irregular and v.v. ? If yes, why ? 

If not, how do you explain that the most common verbs are often iirregular in the Western European languages that I know ?


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## Alxmrphi

Fascinating question!
I'll be really interested to see what others' view is of this subject, but the same thought has often crossed my mind, especially considering the verb 'to be' in some languages.

I don't really know anything about it but my speculation was as the key verbs are often the most common, they're more subject to change through regular usage, but I can't really back that up with any evidence.

What examples can you draw from? I.e. what irregularities have you noticed (in what languages), I'm interested to see if they link up to any similar verbs in verbs I have noticed are irregular in other languages.


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## ThomasK

I refer to Dutch and German, also to English: just have a look at the irregular verb list and you will see that the most basic words are there. 

I would  say they do not change a lot because they are that often used, but that might not be quite true. At any rate I seem to get quite a lot of what I would call 'basic' verbs when looking at that list. 
I must add though: 'horen'/ 'hear' is quite regular with us, but see is not, which seems strange to me --- except if hear were some kind of causative, but that is not self-evident..;.  I think there are fewer irregularities in Italian, more in French. 
By the way: they are all relatively short, which might betray their age as well, I think, if you understand what I mean...


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## entangledbank

Children learn irregular verb forms as separate words before they learn the rules. So they acquire the word 'ran' _before_ they know how to make past tenses. Then they acquire the rule and go through a phase of saying 'runned', before finally working out where the irregular forms fit in the system.

So I suppose the more common a word, the more likely it is they have learnt it early and thoroughly, so it's protected against replacement by analogical processes. Most irregularities are originally because of regular phonetic processes (e.g. Germanic umlaut such as _man/men_ or PIE ablaut such as _drive/drove_ and [Proto-Germanic?] _was/were_); these apply to all words, not just the common ones, but analogy obliterates the less common ones.

There are also processes that do apply only to more common words: functional words phonetically change in ways lexical words don't (e.g. the English future marker _gonna_). This will certainly apply to some of the forms of 'be'.


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## ThomasK

Quite right, it seems to me. But any reason why 'hear' is less irregular ;-) than 'see' ? 

How come 'work' is not irregular (in any of the five languages I know - although in my dialect there is a very old work (wroeten, wrocht, ...) that was irregular). [Did/ do we start working only later on ? This does not make sense as such, but my feeling is that referring to something as 'work' is a cultural interpretation, non-existent in certain 'primitive' cultures]...


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## entangledbank

English also has the old past _wrought_; and English _heard_ vacillated between regular and irregular quite recently: in the eighteenth century good speakers were divided how to pronounce it. Analogical levelling can affect even the most common words: it's just a statistical tendency that commonness matches irregularity.


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## ThomasK

But isn't there a statistical tendency in both E. and Dutch for verbs to become regular? It is at least the case in D. : _kloeg_ has become _klaagde_ (complained), _joeg_ _jaagde_ (hunted, chased), etc. yet they are quite common, I'd say... 

Don't we perceive different trends ?


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## Frank06

ThomasK said:


> Could one say that the key verbs in a language are very often irregular and v.v. ? If yes, why?


I don't see a correlation between frequently used (key) verbs and irregularity an sich.
I see a lot of basic verbs which are irregular (e.g. zijn en hebben), I see a lot of obselete and less frequently used verbs which also feature the list (werven, bieden), and I see a lot of verbs which I cannot call either "key verbs" nor otherwise, such as schrijven (to write), zwemmen (to swim), etc. which also feature the list

So, my guess is that, for a verb to be irregular* (at least what contemporary European IE languages are concerned), it has to be used quite frequently, often, sometimes or hardly at all. Not that I would call this an explanation... 
What I am trying to say is that the extremes are easily to account for, it's the large group in the middle, neither key nor obselete nor infrequent, which pose a real problem...

[* And let's not forget that most of the irregular (strong) verbs of today once were incredibly regular ].

Frank


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## berndf

ThomasK said:


> I refer to Dutch and German, also to English: just have a look at the irregular verb list and you will see that the most basic words are there.


Ok, let's concentrate on Germanic.

As Frank mentioned in his footnote, the term "irregular" verb is historically very misleading. Germanic strong verbs developed out of PIE conjugation patterns which were regular but strong, i.e. changing the root vowels rather that by suffixes only, as it is the case with Germanic weak verbs. 

The standard theory is that strong verbs were the original verbs inherited from PIE while the weak verb were later formations, probably using enclitic auxiliaries, e.g. _he loved_ might have developed out of a form meaning _he love-did*_. The precise origin of the weak conjugation pattern is not known.

This means, that strong verbs are the most basic ones because they are the most ancient ones.
 



ThomasK said:


> I must add though: 'horen'/ 'hear' is quite regular with us, but see is not, which seems strange to me...


Again as Frank indicated, the original regularity of strong conjugations is today obscured. This is because the forms ceased to be productive a long time ago and different forms developed differently. The verb _to see_ you mentioned is derived from PGerm. _*sekhwan_ and different forms were contracted already differently in OE (_ic sēo_, _hē sihþ_, preterite plural _sāwon_). In its PGerm. original form, the verb follows the V-class conjugation (_give-gave_ type).

_______________________________
*_The verb _to love_ was derived from a noun (OE. _lufu=love_) and/or adjective (OHG _liub_=ModHG _lieb_) and is not an original PIE verb._


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## Joannes

berndf said:


> As Frank mentioned in his footnote, the term "irregular" verb is historically very misleading. Germanic strong verbs developed out of PIE conjugation patterns which were regular but strong, i.e. changing the root vowels rather that by suffixes only, as it is the case with Germanic weak verbs.


Yes, and shouldn't we therefore rather be talking about verbs like 'to be' and 'to have' (and not just Germanic), because there post #1 does have a point..

(Tenzij je het effectief specifiek over sterke werkwoorden had, natuurlijk, ThomasK..)


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## ThomasK

Thanks, gentlemen. Please understand that we are just exploring a hypothesis ! ;-)

Interesting consideration: '(ir)regular' is not purely denotative. However, the main point is whether that kind of conjugation could betray something. But Berndf's explanation seems to suggest that those verbs were the oldest. 

May I suggest we focus on the question whether the fact that 'work' and 'love' do not belong to that category whereas 'swim' does, shows that the hypothesis does not make sense. 

At any rate: my feeling is (was ???) that learners who do not know many of those 'strong' (...° verbs, miss out a lot if they want to communicate. (So, indeed, Joh., I did mean more than "be"' and "have"...) That was my starting point, in fact, but I did not mention it.;-)


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## TitTornade

Hi,
In French, verbs are traditionnally classified in 3 groups :
- the first group, the -er endings verbs (around 4000 words that are almost regular): it is the only group of verb that is “alife”: all the new verbs belong to this group. _Most of them are seldom used_.
- the second group, the -ir ending verbs (around 300 verbs) : it is a group of regular verbs.
- the third group, that contains mainly irregular verbs (about 370). _The most common verbs belong to this group: they are the most irregular verbs_!

Of course, conjugations in French (and in roman languages) are much more complicated than in English (and than in Germanic languages). But, I think we can’t say that all the most regular verbs came from recent construction and that all the most irregular are from older construction; the patterns of conjugations often derived from latin.



> The standard theory is that strong verbs were the original verbs inherited from PIE while the weak verb were later formations.


Thus, are the irregular verbs the same in Romance and Germanic languages? (If there are the same in each group… )


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## Frank06

Hi,

I find this an interesting topic. But one thing is slightly unclear to me: what exactly do you mean by _key verbs_?
So far, I have the impression that it is a very subjective, intuitive notion.

I think we can agree that "to have" and "to be" are quite "crucial" verbs in the Western IE languages. But apart from those, what exactly is the criterion (or set of criteria) to decide whether or not a verb is a "key verb"?
Irregularity (in itself?)? Definitely not. 
Frequency? I think I made a case in a previous post against frequency. And besides, if we'd take this into account, then we have to look at the frequency of verbs in different eras (which, by the way, would yield very limited results at best, useless results realistically).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## TitTornade

Frank : I think you can speak French, right ?
The 11 most common French verbs are : _être, avoir, faire, dire, aller, voir, savoir, pouvoir, falloir, vouloir _and _venir _(to be, to have, to do/make/get..., to say, to go, to see, to know, can/may/might/could..., to have to, to want, to come)

Most of them are used as auxiliaries or as modal verbs : is it the meaning of "key verb" ?


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## Erick404

I've read once that agglutinative languages tend to be much more regular. Quechua for example doesn't have a single irregular verb. This could bring more to think about...


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## ThomasK

OK, as for 'key verbs' : I hope it is not too subjective, but I meant verbs that verbs that have a high frequency or maybe have a high frequency as an 'semantically underlying' verb. 
By the latter (non-English) I mean: 'to drag' refers to pulling, and that is a key movement, I think, that anyone should be able to describe when learning a language. I would like to find a list as a matter of fact of such verbs, but I think I could do it based on a list of the 5,000 most frequent words in Dutch.

Another typical aspect of those KV to me is that they often lead to phrasal verbs or 'afgeleide werkwoorden'.


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## ThomasK

Interesting information as such, but I suggest we focus on a possible link between grammatical 'deviancy' (apparent) and frequency/ importance of verbs...


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## sakvaka

Erick404 said:


> I've read once that agglutinative languages tend to be much more regular. Quechua for example doesn't have a single irregular verb. This could bring more to think about...


 
This is true. For example, Finnish has only two irregular verbs (_to be_ and _not_), but there are 27 conjugation types. However, each conjugation has the same suffixes - only the word stems differ.


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## Frank06

Hi,


TitTornade said:


> Frank : I think you can speak French, right ?


I sometimes think so too, but alas ;-). I understand French fairly well, though.



> Most of them are used as auxiliaries or as modal verbs : is it the meaning of "key verb" ?


I made quite a similar list in my head too.



Erick404 said:


> I've read once that agglutinative languages tend to be much more regular. Quechua for example doesn't have a single irregular verb. This could bring more to think about...


*Moderator's note:*
*Let's stick to Western European languages in this thread, as suggested in the original post. Looking at how the thread developped, I think we have to interpret this as Indo-European languages, more specifically Germanic and Romance.*
*Once again, this doesn't mean that the verbal system in Quechua or any other language doesn't deserve a thread on its own!*

Groetjes,

Frank


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## ThomasK

So I just wish to remind you, if you don't mind: I have explained my hypothesis a little more in #16. Does it make sense to any of you ? The modal-verb issue is not what I am interested in, that is way too narrow to me now...


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## Frank06

Hi,


ThomasK said:


> So I just wish to remind you, if you don't mind: I have explained my hypothesis a little more in #16. Does it make sense to any of you ? The modal-verb issue is not what I am interested in, that is way too narrow to me now...


I don't know, but post 16 is still rather vague. You have a hypothesis, you want to use a set of key verbs, but your criteria for compiling that list of key verbs is still too vague and hence the (lack of clear cut) criteria opens the gate widely for a confirmation bias.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## ThomasK

I am not sure whether the criteria are not clear cut. I mean: I am referring to verbs generally presented in the 'irregular verbs' list (not mine). And then I ask: can they in some respect be called 'key verbs'? Are they in some way more important than others - for example having a broader semantic scope (which might explain why they allow for prhasal verbs/...)? Do they perhaps describe certain 'basic' [human] movements?

In fact if we can find another criterion explaining why those are 'irregular', fine with me. My hypothesis is simply: they seem like more important than a lot of others - but I guess I am biased somehow. So are some scientists. I am quite willing to accept that, but please prove the opposite (the hint at 'to swim' is not a bad one, but on the other hand, it is the basic human movement in the water...).


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## CapnPrep

Frank06 said:


> Frequency? I think I made a case in a previous post against frequency.


I would say that you were a bit hasty in your previous post:


Frank06 said:


> I don't see a correlation between frequently used (key) verbs and irregularity an sich.


Yes, we can find frequent verbs that are regular and infrequent verbs that are irregular. But there can still be a _correlation_ between frequency and irregularity. As a very general principle, linguists seem to believe that such a correlation exists. See the discussion of the "conservation effect" here, for example. And this makes sense from the point of view of language acquisition and language evolution: as others have already mentioned, children tend to regularize, and succeeding generations of speakers tend to regularize, unless there is sufficient pressure to maintain irregular forms. This pressure _typically_ comes from frequent usage (but this is not the only possible motivation).

Specifically for German, the facts are perhaps not so clear. For one thing — as a couple of people have already pointed out — strong verbs are not exactly irregular. For another thing, there are not only strong and weak verbs, but also "mixed" verbs, and there is a question of whether to count prefixed verbs separately, or group them together as instances of the same base verb. For example, this table says that 502 of the 1000 most frequent German verbs are strong verbs, but later in the text, the author explains that in fact, 150 of the 1258 _Grundverben_ are strong verbs (and the rest are weak or mixed). This study doesn't specifically say that the strong verbs are the more frequent ones; the author just takes this for granted. I suspect that this result has already been confirmed somewhere else. It's not difficult to do, just time-consuming. One simply needs to look up the relative frequencies of all the verbs in the list, for example here (for the verb _schreiben_), and then do some quick statistics.

Edit: Here's (the middle of) another discussion of this issue, from a diachronic perspective.


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## Frank06

> In fact if we can find another criterion explaining why those are 'irregular', fine with me. My hypothesis is simply: they seem like more important than a lot of others - but I guess I am biased somehow. So are some scientists. I am quite willing to accept that, but please prove the opposite (the hint at 'to swim' is not a bad one, but on the other hand, it is the basic human movement in the water...).


Idem dito for "zinken" (irr.)? (It's my basic movement in the water.)

Your example illustrates exactly what I mean. You almost decree that 'to swim' is a basic human movent in the water. The criterion here is "because I think so". If it would be a basic movement in the water, so what? What would basic movements have to do with the irregularity of the verb? Is _graven_ (irr.) a basic movement in the soil and hence irregular? _Houwen_ (irr.)a basic movement in rock? And _hakken,_ oops, not irregular hence not basic?

The example makes clear that the lack of fixed criteria let the hypothesis and your willingness to confirm that hypothesis, determine which verb is to be regarded as a 'key verb'.
I can't wait for your explanation about how basic "(uit)pluizen", "schrijden", "krimpen" etc. are. And how "un"-basic "maken" is, and "werken", "betalen" etc. etc.

Groetjes,

Frank


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## ThomasK

You might be right. I have been starting from a more limited list, had left out the ones you mention (especially like 'pluizen', 'schrijden'), and had already admitted that the fact that 'werken', 'maken' in Dutch, might indeed be considered counterexamples. Mind you : 'kopen' is 'irregular' with us, 'betalen' is not. 

I still point out: did I decree anything? No, I tried to suggest a possible explanation. And oK, I had proposed a hypothesis - and I thought I had some reasons to do that. 

I would still like to point out that for example 'trekken' (pull) seems more basic to me than 'drag', cull, dislocate, drag, evolve, extract, gather, haul, heave, etc.; idem ditto with 'draw'. That was one of my starting points, and I really wonder whether that is ill-founded or whatever... Then, the next hypothesis was: maybe there are some things that one can do with one's hands, mouth, ears, etc. and which can be considered basic. Is that that unimaginable? And then, next, came the idea: aren't many of them in the list of irregular verbs? Is that a coincidence ? 

I know that some kind of wishful thinking is a hobby, but I welcome all kinds of comments...


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## berndf

I think it is a valid approach in science if you find an obvious correllation (and there is one here, however you define "basic") to start with fuzzy definitions and refine them as your understanding progresses. The only thing to be avoid are ad hoc alterations in order to "immunize" your pet-theory against criticism.

So, I wouldn't want to require Thomas to provide a bullet-proof definition as a pre-requisite for discussion. And I didn't see him shifting definition in an "immunizing" way.

I think the definition which comes with the standard theory, namely that strong verbs are almost always (I say almost because there are _some_ cases of later formation of strong conjugations by analogy) inherited PIE verbs, gets us already most of the way towards a definition producing testable theories of high explanatory power. E.g. it explains why frequent and elementary weak verbs like _to love_ and _to work_ can exist based on verifiable data.

One of the things left to be explained is the phenomenon of the replacement of strong by weak conjugations, e.g. 19th century German _der Hund boll_ vs. today's _der Hund bellte_, and why certain verbs are (maybe?) more likely effected by this tendency than other. Frequence might play a role here but als intutiveness of the conjugation scheme, i.e. did _er bol_ disappear because _bellen_ is infrequently used in preterite? I don't know, I haven't gathered statistics. Or is _er bellt-er boll_ an unituitive scheme? I don't know either; we would have to find testimony from a 19th century speaker.


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## ThomasK

berndf said:


> ... a definition producing testable theories of high explanatory power. E.g. it explains why frequent and elementary weak verbs like _to love_ and _to work_ can exist based on verifiable data.
> 
> One of the things left to be explained is the phenomenon of the replacement of strong by weak conjugations, e.g. 19th century German _der Hund boll_ vs. today's _der Hund bellte_, and why certain verbs are (maybe?) more likely effected by this tendency than other. ...


 
I need to ask: what definition do I need, and what is the link with _love_ and _work_ (which seem counterexamples) ? I thought of this (while not sleeping well): 
- 'groeien' (grow) might be a newer variant of the older 'wassen' (German 'wachsen') traces of which we still find in 'gewas', 'uitwas', 'volwassen' [though we only have 'groeien' in my dialect)
 - 'werken' (work) : 'wroeten' (still a common alternative in some West-Flemish dialects)
 - 'beminnen' (love): 'graag zien/ hebben' (to see with pleasure (?), to love to see, to be eager to see perhaps) ??? 
So there were some strong verbs before, but then: why replace ? Or why drop them? 

Indeed, some that were strong before, have become weak, but then there is a trace in the perfect participle in Dutch (and German): -en. As in 'bakken' (bake), [boek], gebakken; 'wassen' (wash), [wies], gewassen. There might be some more. Why? Some kind of analogy ? The preterite/ imperfectum theory does not seem to have explanatory power as for 'bakken' and 'wassen', I think: we must certainly have used a present perfect of those verbs. 

As for the definition: are you suggesting, Berndf, that a definition of some kind should allow to de-fine, limit, ..., the 'basic verbs', in some semantic way ? (Sorry, I am at a loss here)


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## berndf

ThomasK said:


> As for the definition: are you suggesting, Berndf, that a definition of some kind should allow to de-fine, limit, ..., the 'basic verbs', in some semantic way ? (Sorry, I am at a loss here)


If we are talking about the origin of the dichotomy in PGerm of strong and weak verb, "inherited from PIE" seems to be the most useful definition of "basic". If we are talking about the loss of strong forms in modern Germanic languages, there might be different mechanisms at work and a theory explaining this phenomenon will need different terms.


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

TitTornade said:


> Hi,
> In French, verbs are traditionnally classified in 3 groups :
> - the first group, the -er endings verbs (around 4000 words that are almost regular): it is the only group of verb that is “alife”: all the new verbs belong to this group. _Most of them are seldom used_.
> - the second group, the -ir ending verbs (around 300 verbs) : it is a group of regular verbs.
> - the third group, that contains mainly irregular verbs (about 370). _The most common verbs belong to this group: they are the most irregular verbs_!
> 
> Of course, conjugations in French (and in roman languages) are much more complicated than in English (and than in Germanic languages). But, I think we can’t say that all the most regular verbs came from recent construction and that all the most irregular are from older construction; the patterns of conjugations often derived from latin.
> 
> 
> Thus, are the irregular verbs the same in Romance and Germanic languages? (If there are the same in each group… )


 
I have to disagree with you on one thing: Romance verbs are not more complicated that Germanic ones. Germanic verbs take internal modifications where as most romance language verbs only add suffixes and if there is an internal vowel modification, it is almost always predictable, like Spanish venir>viene or French tenir>tiens, because the natural phonology of the language accommodates the change, where as in English there is no phonology to make "give" to "gave" seem inherently apparent. 

What I am saying is there appear to be more "natural" changes in the Romance languages than in Germanic languages; Spanish a+el makes sense to become al and similarly de+el to del. Even the french à+le and de+le to au and du respectively can be "derived" and understood by a non-native. However, the same is not true for a Germanic strong verb. 

Despite being a native of English (a "Germanic" language), I find Romance language verbs much less complex than those in other Germanic languages, such as German where not only the conjugations are more complicated and less phonologically friendly, but the auxiliarly verbs as a replacement for inflecting for a mood/tense also are a burden. 

I think often the case is that there is some set of core verbs which can be found to be irregular throughout most Indo-European languages and generally it is possible to infer whether a verb will be irregular based on its stem/infinitive given your own knowledge of the regular conjugations. 

Strong verbs are not really irregular but what makes them so is that the whole umlaut/ablaut verb tense system is no longer functional; all new verbs in English always become weak verbs; and the fact that there are _several_ conjugation groups within the strong verbs, thus misleading many to instantly classify them as being irregular. 

I remember when I was in Middle School we were quizzed on strong verbs (list past participle and preterite form of any given verb) and surprisingly most students (all natives of English) failed to get a mark above a B.


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## TitTornade

Hi,
Of course, the question is not to know if the pattern of irregular conjugations is more difficult in Romance or in Germanic languages.
What I was meaning is that for each strong verb in German (or in English), you have to know a maximum of three vowels (or group of letters) and you can conjugate the verb in all the tenses (German: lesen > er liest, ich las, ich habe gelesen: I learnt "_lesen, liest, las, gelesen_" as I learnt in English: "_read, read, read_").  
(_Meyer Wolfsheim: I'm curious to know how you learn irregular French verb._)

In French, it is not always as simple as knowing 3 groups of letters.
On the one hand, you have to know the many different endings and on the other hand, to know the different bases: some verbs (the regular ones) have one base and other verbs can have up to 6 different bases. And knowing the infinitive can’t always help knowing how many bases has a verb!


Let’s rapidly compare (colours correspond to the bases, the endings must be ignored):
Infinitive: voir (to see), avoir (to have) and savoir (to know)
- je *voi*s, j’*ai*, je *sai*s (I see, I have, I know)
- nous *voy*ons, nous *av*ons, nous *sav*ons (we see…)
- j’ai *vu*, j’ai *eu*, j’ai *su* (I’ve seen…)
- je *voy*ais, j’*av*ais, je *sav*ais (I was seeing…)
- je *vi*s, j’*eu*s, je *su*s (I saw…)
- je *verr*ai, j’*aur*ai, je *saur*ai (I will see…)
- *voy*ant, *ay*ant, *sach*ant (seeing…)

_Voir _and _savoir _have 5 bases : voi-, voy-, vu-, vi-, verr- / sai-, sav-, su-, saur-, sach-; but they are different and not used with the same tense. _Avoir _has many bases (not easy to count, it often merged with the ending).  

Of course, I think it would be crazy to create such new verbs with more than one basis, the endings being normally well known by everybody  Nobody can't imagine it!

Another information : we have in French some irregular verbs such has "ouïr" (to hear) or "choir" (to fall) that have too complicated conjugations (and missing tenses...). These verbs can be considered as *key verbs*, but are almost not used at all now. They are replaced by more regular verbs : "entendre" (to hear) and "tomber" (to fall).
Is it a phenomenon observed in Germanic languages? Did some strong verbs become weak verbs (in losing the changings in vowels)? Have some of them been replaced by weak verbs?


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## palomnik

Frank06 said:


> *Moderator's note:*
> *Let's stick to Western European languages in this thread, as suggested in the original post. Looking at how the thread developped, I think we have to interpret this as Indo-European languages, more specifically Germanic and Romance.*
> *Once again, this doesn't mean that the verbal system in Quechua or any other language doesn't deserve a thread on its own!*
> 
> Groetjes,
> 
> Frank



Frank:  After re-reading the original post by ThomasK, I'm not sure that it was his intent to limit this to IE languages.  And actually, I'm not sure it's a good idea to do that; there's no reason that a phenomenon like this would only exist in Europe - and in fact, it doesn't.  Any comments?


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## Meyer Wolfsheim

TitTornade said:


> Hi,
> Of course, the question is not to know if the pattern of irregular conjugations is more difficult in Romance or in Germanic languages.
> What I was meaning is that for each strong verb in German (or in English), you have to know a maximum of three vowels (or group of letters) and you can conjugate the verb in all the tenses (German: lesen > er liest, ich las, ich habe gelesen: I learnt "_lesen, liest, las, gelesen_" as I learnt in English: "_read, read, read_").
> (_Meyer Wolfsheim: I'm curious to know how you learn irregular French verb._)
> 
> In French, it is not always as simple as knowing 3 groups of letters.
> On the one hand, you have to know the many different endings and on the other hand, to know the different bases: some verbs (the regular ones) have one base and other verbs can have up to 6 different bases. And knowing the infinitive can’t always help knowing how many bases has a verb!
> 
> 
> Let’s rapidly compare (colours correspond to the bases, the endings must be ignored):
> Infinitive: voir (to see), avoir (to have) and savoir (to know)
> - je *voi*s, j’*ai*, je *sai*s (I see, I have, I know)
> - nous *voy*ons, nous *av*ons, nous *sav*ons (we see…)
> - j’ai *vu*, j’ai *eu*, j’ai *su* (I’ve seen…)
> - je *voy*ais, j’*av*ais, je *sav*ais (I was seeing…)
> - je *vi*s, j’*eu*s, je *su*s (I saw…)
> - je *verr*ai, j’*aur*ai, je *saur*ai (I will see…)
> - *voy*ant, *ay*ant, *sach*ant (seeing…)
> 
> _Voir _and _savoir _have 5 bases : voi-, voy-, vu-, vi-, verr- / sai-, sav-, su-, saur-, sach-; but they are different and not used with the same tense. _Avoir _has many bases (not easy to count, it often merged with the ending).
> 
> Of course, I think it would be crazy to create such new verbs with more than one basis, the endings being normally well known by everybody  Nobody can't imagine it!
> 
> Another information : we have in French some irregular verbs such has "ouïr" (to hear) or "choir" (to fall) that have too complicated conjugations (and missing tenses...). These verbs can be considered as *key verbs*, but are almost not used at all now. They are replaced by more regular verbs : "entendre" (to hear) and "tomber" (to fall).
> Is it a phenomenon observed in Germanic languages? Did some strong verbs become weak verbs (in losing the changings in vowels)? Have some of them been replaced by weak verbs?


 
That perhaps maybe, but you cannot deny the fact that in general Romance verb conjugations are much more phonologically friendly than their Germanic counterparts.  And one of the bases you listed is in fact no longer in use (the passe simple) in spoken form and you forgot to list the imperfect subjunctive tense (another literary form), "j'eusse", etc.  

- je *voi*s, j’*ai*, je *sai*s (I see, I have, I know)  All irregular but savoir/avoir have a similar pattern.    Analogically, Spanish "he" and "se" sound exactly the same.  
- nous *voy*ons, nous *av*ons, nous *sav*ons (we see…)    All regular.  
- j’ai *vu*, j’ai *eu*, j’ai *su* (I’ve seen…)  There are not nearly as many irregular past participle forms as exist in Germanic languages.  
- je *voy*ais, j’*av*ais, je *sav*ais (I was seeing…)  Imperfect is an incredibly regular tense (only one irregular imperfect etre?)
- je *vi*s, j’*eu*s, je *su*s (I saw…)  Most of the time the passe simple uses the past participle as a base, and the "je vis" mimics the vowel sound in Spanish "ver" to "yo vi."  
- je *verr*ai, j’*aur*ai, je *saur*ai (I will see…)  There are only a handful of irregular future/conditional stems and once you know the core set, you can predict if a future stem will be different.  For example, because venir>viendr-, it is acceptable to assume that tenir>tiendr-  (the same exact pattern is in Spanish, venir>vendr-, tener>tendr-).  "Verrai" is analogical to Spanish "vere."    
- *voy*ant, *ay*ant, *sach*ant (seeing…)  And of course you also have etant; the first present participle accords with the general rule of formation, while the second have a subjunctive base, irregular indeed, but again only limited to a handful of verbs.  

With a knowledge of Spanish verbs it is quite simple to understand French conjugations.  However, with a native knowledge of English verbs, it is still far more difficult to understand German verb conjugations, despite their "simple" bases.  

While strong verbs don't seem to be very frequent in Romance languages, through after-analysis, one could conjecture that Spanish "eres" to "eras" could be a type of internal vowel modification to form a new tense.


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## CapnPrep

Meyer, you and TitTornade evidently both know something about Romance and Germanic conjugations, in particular you agree on how to conjugate these French and German verbs. But you seem to "feel" differently about how "friendly" or how much of a "burden" they are, and which system is "much less complex" or "far more difficult to understand". You can go back and forth about this all day long, and never reach an agreement, because these feelings cannot be measured and compared in any objective manner. More importantly, knowing which of you is right and which is wrong will not help answer the original question of this thread. 

All of the French, Spanish, and German verbs you two have mentioned count as _irregular_ in the context of this discussion, because they are not completely _regular_. Romance and Germanic languages both have a significant number of them, and the question is whether there is any meaningful way to characterize/predict the kinds of verbs that we find in this irregular group.


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## sokol

Much has been said already; here my comments as a late-comer to this thread:

It is indeed the case that many common words are more irregular than less common ones; if you take Indoeuropean languages this is easily demonstrated with the copula - the forms of "to be" in IE languages: here we find several roots used (see the corresponding Wiki article on IE copula, and don't let yourself be irritated by the "laryngals" = h1, h2, h3 - you will easily recognise your native language copula roots if it is an IE one  also they're listed below too).

[I really recommend reading that Wiki article; it may be clear(er) to you afterwards, ThomasK, that probably (!) the IE copula "originally" was perfectly regular but this only is hypothetical as we can only recover the numerous roots for the copula, and how they might have come to be used as copula in the first place. We only know that at a specific point in time - before the IE branches spread over the Eurasian continent and lost contact to each other - several roots were shared by most of them, and some by all.]

The principle is simple: what is repeated over and over again in everyday language usually is more resistant to change (but change there was, even with the IE copula - as shows the Wiki article).

However, if you are searching for some logic why "hear" is less irregular than "see" you probably won't find any (and it would be splitting hairs to try and argue with statistical frequency of those words): repetition preventing change or even facilitating new irregularities (as it seems was the case with IE copula, see the Wiki article) only works as an argument for the most frequent words.

The rest needs more complex explanations (no good example of an irregular root comes to my mind - it should be one used in more than a few IE languages to illustrate the point).
Statistics definitely wouldn't be the solution for explaining them. 

Also please note that a few very common German verbs are perfectly (or for the most part) regular, for example the very frequent modal verbs (present and preterite: regular: müssen, wollen, sollen; irregular but only with umlaut, regular ending: dürfen, durfte; können, konnte; mögen, mochte; irregular - ablaut, no ending in preterite: lassen, liess).

There is indeed a correlation between frequency and irregularity as CapnPrep suggested above - but I am sure that if somebody would take the pains to try and establish a theory based upon this correlation this theory would be doomed to fail.

For some reason some of the most frequent verbs in IE languages indeed _*are*_ very irregular, but it is not so easy as to make a general rule out of it - be it about IE verbs or frequent verbs, or words, in other languages.

And Palomnik, I think you have a point: probably it would be helpful to compare with non-IE, non-European languages, and ThomasK didn't explicitly exclude them even though discussion so far mainly was about IE languages.

However, I don't think the original question will be helped with listing plenty of paradigms (be it of IE or non-IE langauges): this just would make this thread an endless list which nobody would be willing to follow anymore (or I certainly wouldn't ).
So let's please stick to a few examples, let's try and keep it simple, that's my suggestion. 
That'll be challenge enough to those of us who know nothing about more exotic languages.


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## ThomasK

Thanks, Sokol, very interesting indeed. I may be allowed to point out that my main focus was not on the irregularity as such - it reminds me of the argument on the sex of the angels ;-). 

I am interested in whether those verbs that are now 'strong', 'irregular' verbs (i.e., that students of a foreign language cannot deduce from the rules), *that particular group, can also considered 'basic' from a pragmatic-semantic point of view*. 

Frank06 _(or is it 007)_ did made a fairly strong case against my assumption, I must agree, by referring to special examples like shrinking, investigating (uit-pluizen) in Dutch, which do not seem that important. Yet, the funny thing is that most people do seem to feel the same way as I do, and refer to *frequency (which also implies 'communicative importance [importance ???]'*, I think, at least to some extent) in order to explain irregularity. 

Yet, it remains funny that 'work' is generally regular, but that may be due to culture _(we did not realize we worked for some centuries ????),_ and 'make' is very often also regular, which is the strongest counterargument, I thiink.


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## berndf

ThomasK said:


> I am interested in whether those verbs that are now 'strong', 'irregular' verbs (i.e., that students of a foreign language cannot deduce from the rules), *that particular group, can also considered 'basic' from a pragmatic-semantic point of view*.


To repeat my point in a nut-shell: "No, but":
- "No", because there are simply too many counter examples.
- "But", because there is nevertheless a significant correllation. And the explanation of this correlation (in Germanic languages) is that strong verbs are older and older verbs are* often but not always* the more basic ones.


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## ThomasK

Thanks. Just wondering: are they ways out? (Not because I want to prove my point, just wondering !). 

I remember for example the reference to the French older words for hearing, the older words in Dutch for working. How come some very 'basic' words are sometimes replaced ? How can they, if they are that important ? (I do not remember Guy Deutscher referring to that in _The Unfolding of Language_)


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## sokol

ThomasK said:


> Thanks. Just wondering: are they ways out? (Not because I want to prove my point, just wondering !).


Berndf has summarised the gist on which - it seems - already a few of us agree upon here; but I'm a bit puzzled about this sentence, what do you mean by a "way out"?


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## ThomasK

A way out... of the falsification of the hypothesis (as now it is "no but"). I thought of other arguments sustaining the hypothesis that they somehow belong together as 'basic':

 - a lot of them allow for phrasal verbs in English, _samengestelde_/ derived verbs in Dutch and German (think of all the 'stellen' derivations, both in German and Dutch) [by the way: why is 'stellen' no longer common in Dutch, and is it replaced by 'zetten' ?)
 - quite some seem to refer to parts of the body, limbs (hands, feet, mouth, the senses, ..

Hope I am not stupidly insisting: I think I am still exploring this group of verbs...


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## berndf

ThomasK said:


> A way out... of the falsification of the hypothesis (as now it is "no but"). I thought of other arguments sustaining the hypothesis that they somehow belong together as 'basic'


One should be very cautious with this line of thinking because it usually leads to tautologies where the definition "basic" is twisted until it means "being a strong verb".

But one thing to bear in mind is that "basic" is always dependent on the cultural, technological and environmental conditions. E.g., for us to swim might be a "basic" verb. For a people living in a desert the action might be something extremely exotic. Or a Stone Age civilization will probably not have a word for _to forge_.



ThomasK said:


> I remember for example the reference to the French older words for hearing, the older words in Dutch for working.


OE_ wyrcan_ had a past tense ablaut, _he worhte,_ yet it is a weak verb. This is an additional complication.





ThomasK said:


> How come some very 'basic' words are sometimes replaced ? How can they, if they are that important ? (I do not remember Guy Deutscher referring to that in _The Unfolding of Language_)


There are many possible reasons why a root can be lost. The precise reason will often remain unknown because some of these changes happened long before the oldest attested Germanic language. But for a few we have reflexes of the old verbs in OE and/or OHG which gives us a clue. E.g. the verbs _beon = to become_ and_ wesan = to remain, to rest, to exist_ were lost when they merged with the _is, sind_ root (cognate of Latin _sum_) to form the OE verb _beon-wesan_ > ModE _to be_. Similarly, Latin _stare = to stand_ is lost in modern French because it merged with _esse = to be_: _stare>estare>ester>être, esse>essere>estere>estre>être._

Another possible reason for replacement of a word it that it gets "competition" from imported or newly formed words and the "old" one starts to shift its meaning, like English _haven _getting competition from _harbour_ and _port_ and is eventually confined to a figurative meaning.


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## ThomasK

I am about 2.5 years older ni the meantime, but I just happened to read something interesting in this connection: 




> Semantiek: sterke werkwoorden hebben veel meer synoniemen dan zwakke werkwoorden.
> *Onregelmatige vormen overleven dankzij een frequent gebruik. Werkwoorden die veel gebruikt worden hebben kennelijk een betekenis waar veel behoefte aan is. *
> Dat verklaart waarom sterke werkwoorden ook veel synoniemen en varianten hebben. Die zijn dan meestal regelmatig. Een voorbeeld is: _Lopen: kuieren, slenteren, wandelen, benen, gaan, ijsberen, kuieren, marcheren, pikkelen, schrijden, slenteren, stappen, stiefelen, treden, struinen, voortbewegen, wandelen, zich begeven._




So: strong/ irreg. verbs can survive due to a frequent use. Verbs that are often used apparently have a meaning that is much needed.


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## sanne78

At the end of the article is this quote:

_*Geschiedenis: sterke werkwoorden zijn oude werkwoorden*_
_...Sterke werkwoorden komen uit een tijd lang geleden dat het Nederlands - of een voorloper daarvan - anders werkte en werkwoorden in de verleden of voltooide tijd een andere klank kregen. _
_‘Onregelmatige werkwoorden zijn vaker primaire acties, lichaamsbewegingen en dergelijke. Zolang mensen praten over zichzelf hebben ze deze begrippen nodig gehad. En zo overleven de onregelmatige vormen..._

I fully agree with this. I often tell my students that irregular verbs are the oldest / the most essential verbs. Real "key verbs"!
Among others: *to be, to have, to give, to go, to bring, to come, to do, to say, to sleep, to sit,..*

I have no knowledge of the history of languages, but it seems obvious to me.


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## Frank06

sanne78 said:


> I often tell my students that irregular verbs are the oldest / the most essential verbs. Real "key verbs"!
> Among others: *to be, to have, to give, to go, to bring, to come, to do, to say, to sleep, to sit,..*


And what do you tell about irregular, strong verbs which aren't really key words? bieden, delven, bergen, blijken, (be)driegen, glimmen, kerven, krimpen (geen 60° was in die tijd), schrijden, ...


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## ThomasK

Aaarrhhhh, here is the 'old' argument again! Well, I can't deny that, Frank, I mainly mentioned the article because it seems to corroborate my hypothesis whereas I cannot but admit that _delven, bergen, glimmen, kerven, krimpen_ (geen 60° was in die tijd), _schrijden_, ... do not seem to be indispensable. I do not think that is true for _bieden_, _(b)lijken, (be)driegen;_ I think those are quite common and useful (not easily avoidable_),_ just like _bergen,_ referring to hiding (_ver_-) seems more useful already, even now.

Just one hypothesis : 
_- delven,_ referring to digging into the earth, might have been more important then
_- __glimmen: no idea - kind of synonym of _schijnen_ (to shine) ? _
_- __kerven: might that be the first verb of cutting ??? _
_- krimpen_ : a form of getting smaller ? 
_- schrijden:_ the alternative for going when slowly ?  

It might be interesting to find out whether these or similar verbs in other languages are strong as well. In English it seems to work except for _kerven_ (carving). 

But it is only a hypothesis.


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## Istriano

I would say *voltar *(''to become'') is a key verb in Brazilian Portuguese, but it's 100% regular 
*Falar *(''to speak'' but also ''to tell'' and ''to say'') is also regular.

Portuguese has fewer irregular verbs that Spanish and Italian. In Spanish, even gerunds are many
times irregular (yendo) or semi-irregular (durmiendo)...


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## ThomasK

I do not mean that it is a general rule, but how about the ones that are irregular, Istriano? Are they important, teh important ones, do you think?


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## sanne78

Just a few things:

1° I think that "to be" and "to have" are the most frequent verbs in most (European) languages; they are as well the most irregular.

2° English is rather peculiar, as you can 'easily' distinguish the 'old' verbs from the 'new' verbs. The newer verbs are verbs related to modern concepts (electricity, computers, cars) and/or are of French/Latin origin.
These are all regular.

The older verbs are of Germanic (and ??) origin, are related to basic concepts (human feelings /activities) and can be irregular. 
Apparently verbs have a tendency (only in English??) to become regular: to dream-dreamed (instead of dreamt).

Of course there are loads of exceptions, but *to me* this is the general rule.

PS: Criticism of this point of view is welcome, because, as I said, this is just how I see it, and I have no in depth knowledge of the history of the English language (or any other language for that matter )

PPS: I notice that for French people learning English the 'modern' verbs are fairly easy to learn, because they are of French origin (to continue, to insist, to invite, to finish), whereas the key/irregular verbs are much more difficult.


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## Frank06

If we would make a very black and white classification of contemporary Dutch verbs, using the axis irregular (or rather, strong) verbs and key verbs, then we get 4 (very artificial) groups.

*1. irregular + KV*
- verbs for to be, to have in quite a few IE languages
- verbs which young native speakers learn after a certain age. 
I guess we all have heard dialogues as:
Kid: Ik loopte (reg.)
Parent: Ik LIEP (irr.)
Kid: (slightly annoyed) Ja, ik loopte (reg.)​But most native speakers wouldn't make that kind of mistakes anymore after a while.

*2. irregular + non-KV*
To me, this is the most interesting group, but quite a diverse one: 
(a) it contains irregular verbs 
- which are commonly mixed up, messed up if we'd use prescriptive standards (e.g. slagen/slaan, jagen, ...); 
- which have alternative forms, accepted by the global speech community, often codified in authorative dictionaries. 
(For example KV(?) zeggen, zei/zegde, gezegd (obs. zeide being an interesting form))
Less clear examples: one can find instances of (incorrect) "stijgde" in online texts, but those forms hardly yield strong reactions. Try to post a text with "loopte", and the reactions are quite aggressive. One can hardly find an instance of "valde" (correct "viel").

(b) On the other end of the scale, we have irregular verbs which are hardly used anymore in _contemporary_ Dutch, which clearly belong to the written or more formal registers and which often seem to serve as a kind of peacock's tail.

*3. regular + KV*
praten, werken, betalen, ...

*4. regular + non-KV*
All the rest 

If I understand well, Thomas is solely talking about the 1st group, while, at least in my opinion, expanding or limiting the possible meaning of KV.



ThomasK said:


> I am interested in whether those verbs that are now 'strong', 'irregular' verbs (i.e., that students of a foreign language cannot deduce from the rules), *that particular group, can also considered 'basic' from a pragmatic-semantic point of view*.


Here it becomes tricky. Thomas doesn't seem to like a historical approach ("Aaarrhhhh, here is the 'old' argument again! "), but nevertheless, in his "pragmatic-semantic" approach, he smuggles in historical aspects, ad lib. on very subjective grounds, viz. his "semantic-pragmatic" p.o.v.

Which makes me agree with Bernd's remark:


berndf said:


> One should be very cautious with this line of thinking because it usually leads to tautologies where the definition "basic" is twisted until it means "being a strong verb".


 


> Frank06 did made a fairly strong case against my assumption, I must agree, by referring to special examples like shrinking, investigating (uit-pluizen) in Dutch, which do not seem that important. Yet, the funny thing is that most people do seem to feel the same way as I do, and refer to *frequency (which also implies 'communicative importance [importance ???]'*, I think, at least to some extent) in order to explain irregularity.


I have less problems with your assumption, which could apply to class 1. I have more problems with your general approach, your vague terminology, and, excuse me, your fancy hyphenated words. 
I just tried to expand the little tiny hole in the wall, which could lead to tunnelvision, and indicate that it is rather pointless to talk about irregular strong KV if one isn't particularly willing to consider or doesn't want to take strong non-KV and regular KV into account (my artificial groups 2 and 3).


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## ThomasK

_Let's start with your problems: I have no problem recognizing that I venture upon some hypotheses, trying to combine all kinds of information starting from some kind of intuition. And OK, I use those hyphenated words in order to explain that I think that my theory is somewhere in-between, because I think that explanation borders on semantics, maybe on pragmatics (meaning defined by context, I mean). The old problem was not a simple historic problem, in my view, but your reference to those verbs,_ delven_, etc. which I recognize, and which I tried (!) to deal with in #44 --- because I recognized it as a valid argument._

_I don't understand why you think I don't want to include 2. I am inclined to consider_ slaan_, maybe_ jagen_, as belonging to the KV group indeed; I mean: they seem fairly important in every-day conversation, etc._ 

Of course *'basic'* is a fairly general word. But I am using it until I can maybe show that those verbs are somehow *'primary'* (like with colours), wiht respect to others. And I love exchanges that force me to sharpen the way of formulating things, and grant me a chance to do some freewheeling (and maybe never 'land').

What I happened to come across did seem interesting to me and seemed like some corroboration of my hypothesis.


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## Istriano

ThomasK said:


> Of course *'basic'* is a fairly general word. But I am using it until I can maybe show that those verbs are somehow *'primary'* (like with colours)



Even _primarity _of colors is relative 



> For subtractive combination of colors, as in mixing of pigments  or dyes,  such as in printing, the primaries normally used are cyan, magenta,  and yellow,


 (Wikipedia)  
Dat is echt goed


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## ThomasK

In what sense, I? 

I also thought that maybe (!) one could assume there are some basic movements like taking, picking up, throwing, ..., basic human 'acts' like speaking/ saying (maybe including yelling), weeping/ crying, etc. I can't think that is original, but where are those verbs described? 

If some verbs turn regular, like the ones that Frank pointed out (_jagen, graven_, ...) in Dutch, it could be because there are not so often used as W. Tabak points out, I believe, and thus tend to 'regular-ize'. But then, that can hardly be the case for laughing in Dutch, which had _loech_ as past form, or baking, once _boek_, I believe. That is something I must - and readily admit. But I wish there might be some other explanation.


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## Welshie

I don't know if it is useful to extend the discussion to the regularity of noun declension in Slavic languages such as Russian. Can we say that "common" or "basic" words are more likely to have irregular declension patterns? For example, the following words in Russian all have irregular declensions:

Brother  (Брат)
Sister  (Сестра)

Mother (Мать) (Father "Отец" is surprisingly regular, apart from the weak vowel)

Daughter (Дочь)
Son (Сын)

Land (Земля)

However, I imagine the same considerations are valid for Russian nouns as for verbs in other languages: There exist irregular uncommon nouns and perfectly regular common nouns.


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## ThomasK

Well, interesting at least. It reminds me of Dutch: _kinderen_/ children is irregular (double plural), and so is eieren/ eggs. And one could at least say that it is due to their frequency that they are kept like that. Yet, I don't think there are other 'basic' words are irregular. So it would not work with us, and certainly not as a feature that shows the importance of words. But thanks a lot for mentioning it.


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## sanne78

...but in English you have some 'basic' nouns which have irregulare plurals:
man (men), woman (women), child (children)... A coincidence??


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## ThomasK

You're right. Not an incidence that they have been preserved, I guess. 

But my starting-point was trying to find some 'key'/ 'basic'/ primary verbs that might constitute a starting-point for foreign learners. In the meantime it has become clear that quite some are not useful. _(That is something I must admit, though I feel the urge to wonder whether there could be a reason why some verbs have stayed irreg. and not others. Frequency might be the main reason - and I'd think that frequency refers - to some extent - to significance)_

The funny thing is that while exploring all kinds of (forms of) cutting in Chinese, someone referred me to oligo-synthetic languages (based on a general stem, getting further meaning by affixes being added). Alas they don't really exist. But the 'stems' might have been 'basic verbs'. But it does not exist, alas. ;-)


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## ThomasK

Three years later I noticed something: our phrasal verbs in Dutch (prefix [prep.] + V) are all - or about all - based on the verbs that I once called 'key verbs'. The fact that they were used, does show something, doesn't it ? But I'll examine this in another thread.


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## ThomasK

About 2.5 years later I have come to realize that the weak verbs I referred to often have one particular feature, which I consider interesting for learners of West Germanic languages*: the fact that they can take a prefix, either _be-, ver-, ont-_, etc. (in itself about meaningless, I'd say), or a preposition-like prefix (mee-, uit-, ...). Especially the former, I think, allow us to define a group that must be important because it led to/ allowed for/... such a productive mechanism, still productive to some extent in Dutch. What I think useful is explaining those verbs to learning thus allowing them to deduce the meaning in quite some cases... 

I could ask the question in a different way: what do those verbs have in common, if not that they are 'key verbs'? But I must admit: there are also some 'strong' verbs showing up that feature... 

*English has some traces of that in beget, forget, but it does have phrasal verbs of course, which are similar, I think.


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## Ben Jamin

Welshie said:


> I don't know if it is useful to extend the discussion to the regularity of noun declension in Slavic languages such as Russian. Can we say that "common" or "basic" words are more likely to have irregular declension patterns? For example, the following words in Russian all have irregular declensions:
> 
> Brother  (Брат)
> Sister  (Сестра)
> 
> Mother (Мать) (Father "Отец" is surprisingly regular, apart from the weak vowel)
> 
> Daughter (Дочь)
> Son (Сын)
> 
> Land (Земля)
> 
> However, I imagine the same considerations are valid for Russian nouns as for verbs in other languages: There exist irregular uncommon nouns and perfectly regular common nouns.


How many words do you know that are declined the same way as ‘Мать’?


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## LilianaB

Welshie said:


> I don't know if it is useful to extend the discussion to the regularity of noun declension in Slavic languages such as Russian. Can we say that "common" or "basic" words are more likely to have irregular declension patterns? For example, the following words in Russian all have irregular declensions:
> 
> Brother  (Брат)
> Sister  (Сестра)




Hi, Welshie. I don't think, unfortunately this hypothesis could prove true for Russian, or other Slavic languages. Declensions in Russian don't have anything to do whether a noun is often used or not. The types of declensions, whether regular or irregular, have more to do with historical development of the word and phonological factors, I think.


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## ThomasK

I do think that very common words will keep their 'deviant' declension longer, because they're so often used. I see for example that the imperfect of _jagen _(hunting) in Dutch has turned regular. I must admit, that _lachen _became regular before, but is that so commonly used (in the past) ???


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## osemnais

I have read somewhere that using irregular forms is a quicker way for the human brain to analyze the word. I.e. when it hears a regular one, it must analyze first the root and then the suffix(es), each of which takes some time, whereas all the irregular forms are being dealt with as single items, i.e. not made up of stems and suffixes. Think about it:
talk|s
talk|ed
talk|ing
watch
watch|es
watch|ing
watch|ed
but:
am
are
is
was
were
have
has
had
This is even more obvious in languages which have richer declension than English. Therefore, it's more efficient the most common words to be irregular.


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## arsham

I think two factors play a major role in forming irregularities: use of different stems or even roots (like go vs went, merger of two distinct roots/verbs) and remodelling of verbs or certain tense form after other (more recurrent!!) patterns. In addition, you also have the possibility of obsolete rules! for example changing the long vowel to its corresponding short one used to be a rule in forming past tenses in English
keep -->kept
however, since "ee" has shifted from /e:/ to /i:/ the rule makes no sense and is forgotten!


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## ThomasK

Thanks for all those considerations about the forms of irregularity. My question remains if they were (at some time in time) more important than others, or why they remained irregular, whereas there is a clear tendency in Dutch to move towards regular endings. Thanks in advance...


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## LilianaB

I think this a problem valid mostly in relation to Germanic languages. I am not too familiar with Romance languages which may be another group that has regular and irregular verbs. It is a totally irrelevant question in relation to many other language: Slavic, Baltic languages, for example, and many other, I suspect. Spanish has irregular verbs, but even in this case, I don't know how irregular verbs in Spanish could be related to this discussion. Is it just something that is happening in some Germanic languages, or are you looking for a general tendency in other languages as well?


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## ThomasK

Well, I must admit that my starting point was my quest for 'basic verbs' (if ever: if they ever exist, if they can ever be listed - as how do you define 'basic'-ness ?). On the other hand, any morphological or syntactic or ..; feature that seems to mark 'basic' verbs (words ???) might be interesting... By the way: I think words like 'to be' and modals are often 'deviant', aren't they?


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## arsham

ThomasK said:


> Well, I must admit that my starting point was my quest for 'basic verbs' (if ever: if they ever exist, if they can ever be listed - as how do you define 'basic'-ness ?). On the other hand, any morphological or syntactic or ..; feature that seems to mark 'basic' verbs (words ???) might be interesting... By the way: I think words like 'to be' and modals are often 'deviant', aren't they?


the term basic verb is not well defined! If by that you mean the simplest verbal lexical units, then you should specify the period you're referring to since the vocabularu including what you call the basic words change over time! For example paywâxtan=to reply/answer used to be a basic verb in Middle Persian but it is not even used in Classical Persian!
The explanations I gave cover the case of copula and modals. It is well known that various forms of "to be" result from the merger of different roots! It is the same situation in Persian!


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## ThomasK

I know I am utopian, but who knows that this exchange might result in some insight. 

I do not wish to refer to particular period, I am aiming at a list of verbs that needs to be taught to foreigners wishing to make fast progress. Maybe in fact it would be more reasonable to look for basic (speech) acts, acts that seem to have been / essential since the beginning as they seem... existential. Replying for example seems quite useful, but I do not think it was used in my Flemish dialect, as saying (with some addition) is clear enough in most cases.


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## arsham

ThomasK said:


> I know I am utopian, but who knows that this exchange might result in some insight.
> 
> I do not wish to refer to particular period, I am aiming at a list of verbs that needs to be taught to foreigners wishing to make fast progress. Maybe in fact it would be more reasonable to look for basic (speech) acts, acts that seem to have been / essential since the beginning as they seem... existential. Replying for example seems quite useful, but I do not think it was used in my Flemish dialect, as saying (with some addition) is clear enough in most cases.



well then your question is not an etymological one! it is merely a matter of memorisation, as a novice you should memorise them, you just learn by heart then you look for historical explanations!


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## LilianaB

Hi. In which language, Thomas? I have a feeling that you have been assuming that there are regular verbs which have just one basic form and two or three predictable endings and some irregular verbs the basic forms of which cannot be predicted easily. It is not as simple in many languages. There are so many conjugations and so many exceptions to those conjunctional patters in some languages, like Slavic languages and Baltic languages, for example, that one stops carrying which verbs are regular and which ones are not. It is easier in many cases to just memorize the forms, I think than to learn all the rules.


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## ThomasK

@both: Memorizing is of course necessary, but what are the "main" verbs? That is my main issue. 

The language does not really matter for that, L, but I only thought/ supposed irregularity (not really etymology) might refer to importance, that is why I asked the question.


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## arsham

ThomasK said:


> @both: Memorizing is of course necessary, but what are the "main" verbs? That is my main issue.
> 
> The language does not really matter for that, L, but I only thought/ supposed irregularity (not really etymology) might refer to importance, that is why I asked the question.


No, not necessarily! Many languages have irregular verbs that are not "basic words", ex. absoudre, ouïr, paître etc in French or seek, befall, sink and behold in English or yashtan, alfaxtan and nefrîdan in Persian!


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## ThomasK

Quite right, I am afraid, but then: could they not have been more important at an earlier stage? I see paraître (become visible) might not have been that unimportant. _Seek _certainly was important, as searching will probably always have been important. So will _hold, fall, _and_ sink_, I think - my point is that knowing hold, fall, may help to understand _befall, behold, _more easily, and/or to remember them. 

But I understand: sometimes the etymology of the verbs is not clear. I suppose that is what you mean.


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## arsham

ThomasK said:


> Quite right, I am afraid, but then: could they not have been more important at an earlier stage? I see paraître (become visible) might not have been that unimportant. _Seek _certainly was important, as searching will probably always have been important. So will _hold, fall, _and_ sink_, I think - my point is that knowing hold, fall, may help to understand _befall, behold, _more easily, and/or to remember them.
> 
> But I understand: sometimes the etymology of the verbs is not clear. I suppose that is what you mean.



The point I am trying to make is that "basic vocabulary" and "grammatical irregularity" are two distinct issues that overlap but whose historical evolution remains rather separate!


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## LilianaB

I have no idea which verbs are regular and which are not in the Slavic and Baltic languages, because it is not important there. You have to know the forms more intuitively or memorize many forms if you want to speak those languages and not think for five minutes about the rules. I might be different, because I learned those languages the natural way, but my feeling is that it is not as important in those languages as it might be in other languages because there are so many exceptions to the rules and different conjugational forms.


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## ThomasK

I did not mean to say ir-/regularity as such is important, but my starting-point is Dutch (or any language) for beginners. In Dutch the irregular forms are the ones allowing for lots of derivations, that's why I focused on them.


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## LilianaB

Yes, that might be true about one particular language, but I do not think it is true about all languages, or can be considered a general rule.


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## ThomasK

Right. But don't you derive other verbs from "key verbs" in Lithuanian? 

I know (I think I know...) there are some prefixes in Slavic languages too, like _roz-_ (out of), if I am not mistaken...


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## LilianaB

Do you mean like adding different prefixes, for example? It is a totally different verb system.


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## ThomasK

Yes, that is what I meant. So: no similarities to other European languages with respect to verb-building?


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## LilianaB

I don't know Thomas: I have to think about it. There are so many different prefixes and verb forms in Lithuanian and in Slavic languages, that I don't really know if it makes much difference if the verb follows a conjugation without any exceptions or not. I don't really think it is that important in those languages. It is more important in Germanic languages, I think.


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## ThomasK

I just wondered whether you had this agglutinative (...) technique, combining verbs and prefixes, not so much whether those were mainly irregular. I'll see what you think/find...


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## LilianaB

See, I am not sure what you mean by irregular verbs in other languages. I know what you mean by that term in reference to Germanic languages. What kind of verb would you consider irregular for the purpose of this study? Buti is considered an irregular verb in Lithuanian (to be) because the forms in the present tense do not even start with the same letter. It follows a regular conjugation patterns, though.


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## francisgranada

As to non-Indoeuropean languagase, some Hungarian examples (maybe helpful for this discussion):

To be (more stems plus irregular)
infinitive: lenni
present: vagyok, vagy, van ...
past: voltam, voltál, ...

To eat (irregular)
infinitive: enni
present: eszem, eszel ...
past: ettem, ettél  ...

To drink (irregular)
infinitive: inni
present: iszom, iszol ...
past: ittam, ittál  ...

To go (irregular)
infinitive: menni
present: megyek, mész, megy ...

To come (more stems plus irregular)
infinive: jönni
present: jövök, jösz, jön ...
past: jöttem ...
imperative: gyere, gyertek

etcetera ...

But other "key verbs" as to see, look, hear, hold, live, die, speak, say, stand, sit, hit, ask, fly, answer, fall ... are regular.

**************
It has been told that the most frequently used verbs tend to maintain their irregularity. But the opposite seems to be true as well: the most frequently used verbs tend to _become _irregular. The verbs we find today irregular, in the past could be quite regular. For example, the romance forms for "to be": sum, es, est ... soy, eres, es... sono, sei, è ...  but also the Slavic forms: som/sam, si, je ... jsem, jsi, je/jest ... derive from supposedly regular Indoeuropen forms like *esmi, *esi, *esti ...


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## ThomasK

I am afraid you're right: there is no simple truth here. Thanks for your considerations (and we have a similar problem in Dutch: some irregular verbs don't seem important, have almost gone, and some others, very essential ones, are regular).


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## francisgranada

Hello, Thomas .  I think I understand what you are "looking for", so inspite of all the informations and opinions, don't yet give up ... because there are some evident correlations. E.g. even the Hungarian (non Indoeuropean) verb for "to be" behaves like in most of the IE languages (i.e. irregular and more stems). 

Maybe, a deeper attention should be paid to what we call or consider "irregular"  ...  E.g. the verb for "to go" is irregular in all (or most of) the Romance languages, but the Latin _vadere _(_vado, vadis, vadit ...) _seems to be regular.  I.e. the proper criterion of "irregularity" also changes in time, but maybe not arbitrarily ...


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## ThomasK

Thanks for your support. You know, the main reason/ starting-point for me was that a lot of them are the basis of phrasal verbs in Dutch (taking the very specific prefixes be-, ver-, ont-, etc., which are not prepositions), and therefore explaining them helps students to deduce the meaning of some new verbs. But it made me wonder if it could mean that they are more important. 

_Vadere _: interesting,a nd right. That reminds me of the fact that some very important words are also often replaced by imported words, whereas that seems contrary to any hypothesis like mine...


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## francisgranada

The previous example with vadere could also support your hypothesis: _vadere _in Latin is practically regular, because was not used so frequently. There was a "more important" verb for "to go": _*ire*_ (eo, is, it...) which is a bit irregular. _Ire _then merged with _vadere _(or is no more used, as in Italian), so _vadere _became a  "key verb" (in the present tense) and also became irregular in the Romance languages.

The English forms like won't, don't, can't, cannot ... can be also cosidered as some kind of "modern" irregularity that happens to "very important" verbs. On the other hand, compare for example the Slovak and Polish conjugation of the verb "to be". Slovak: _som, si, je, sme, ste, sú_ and Polish: _jestem, jesteś, jest, jesteśmy, jesteście, są_. What happens is that the Polish verb tends to be regular again, replacing some old forms with new ones (jestem, jesteś, jesteśmy, jesteście). So it seems that both the tendencies, "regularization" and "deregularization", are present in languages at the same time (besides other tendencies and processes, of course).


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## LilianaB

Yes, you are right Francisgranada, but there is a different problem in Slavic and Baltic languages. The word _to be_ in Polish is irregular from a different point of view: its past forms look totally different than the present tense. In the past tense and the future these conjugation forms have the same stem as _to be _- _byc_, whereas in the present tense they look totally different, as you have shown above. The verb is considered irregular because its basic forms differ. On the other hand, the conjugation endings look regular. The same is true about the Lithuanian verb _to be_. I was talking about it in some previous threads.


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## francisgranada

The Polish verb być "remains" irregular also in the present tense, because in the third person we have still the "original" forms _jest _and _są_ (instead of *_jeste _and *_jestą_). I only wanted to demonstrate a possible _tendency _towards regural forms also in the so called "key verbs".


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## LilianaB

I think that there are different types of irregularity in Slavic and Baltic languages. Some verbs could be irregular as to their basic forms and go through regular declensions, don't you think so?


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## francisgranada

Of course. How are the verbs to be and to go conjugated in Lithuanian?


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## LilianaB

The verb to be -- buti is an irregular verb because its present tense third person singular -- one of the three basic forms in Lithuanian is different form the infinitive buti -- it is yra. So the present tense goes like that: esu, esi, yra, esame, esate, yra. Past tense: buvau, buvai, buvo, buvome, buvote, buvo. In the present tense the forms start with a different letter: it is e in all persons except the third person where it starts with y, regardless, the conjugation patterns are still considered almost regular. The word eiti, - to go is regular, I think, except the i changes into j in the past tense: einu, eini, eina, einame, einate eina. Past tense: ejau, ejai, ejo, ejome, ejote, ejo.


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## mataripis

I think root words that are used from one place to another that change in many forms is the primary caused why they (verbs) become irregular.


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