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#116008 11/15/03 02:30 AM
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This weekend I should try to put together a list of interesting regular verbs--verbs with verve and pristine regularity that might appeal to 14-year-old students.

Any suggestions?

There are:

to walk
to talk


...but they are so humdrum.

to steer
to roll
to bolt

...still not very interesting.

Please do suggest some exciting regular verbs (all tenses) if you are so inspired. Ones that don't require dropping a final 'e' or doubling a final consonant would be ideal since I'm looking for eloquently manageable kinds of verbs.

Many thanks for any offerings.


#116009 11/15/03 02:36 AM
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Dear WW: Here's a URL to a list of regular verbs.
http://vocabulary.englishclub.com/regular-verbs.htm


#116010 11/15/03 02:52 AM
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slurp
burp
barf (or heave)
fry
badger
bother
chuck
rattle
whisper
snort
moo!




#116011 11/15/03 11:26 AM
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Hi Doctor

These verbs are regular, perhaps, but not in terms of spelling. Most verbs ending in 'e' take an 'irregular' ending insofar as they drop the e for the continuous 'ing'.

Similarly, the 'regular' verbs ending in 'y' change spelling for the past tense.

I understand that they are regular in that they follow the standard way of taking inflections, but in terms of spelling, you still need to learn supplementary rules to actually complete all the inflections. So how regular is that?

cheer

the sunshine warrior

ps. Apologies if this post seems all disjointed - I wrote it while listening to a long-winded complaint on the phone (some of us wage slaves work weekends as well), and some of Mrs Brown's animadversions may have come through.


#116012 11/15/03 01:30 PM
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Oh, many thanks! Jackie, those verbs are precisely the kinds of verbs that I was looking for--ones that would be more interesting to conjugate than boring ones.

I'll move shortly to dropped and doubled endings, but the first ones I wanted to be very, very simple, yet funny, too. These will do the trick.

Edit: I won't use to fry, for instance, since the 'y' would have to be dropped, but the ones that are precisely regular with no changes will be best for the introduction. We'll move on to the regular verbs that have spelling variations, such as 'to fry' later, and then on to the irregular ones that will be challenging.


#116013 11/15/03 02:02 PM
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in terms of spelling, you still need to learn supplementary rules to actually complete all the inflections. So how regular is that?

I ran into this in Spanish classes and I object. A Spanish example might be something like buscar which has forms like busque, but that's just a spelling convention to retain the [k] sound when the c would be sounded like an s or a th due to the following vowel.

The terms regular and irregular were preceded by the terms weak and strong respectively. The past tense of the weak verbs involved a suffix that included a d or a t, at least in the singular. The mark of a strong verb was a change in the root vowel sound, a process known as ablaut. Note that some of the weak verbs also had a vowel change, but it was due to other things than what is strictly known as ablaut. Examples of these weak verbs would include teach, taught and think, thought. Probably these qualify as irregular verbs today but they were considered weak in OE.

On the other hand, would a verb like put, which doesn't change at all, be considered regular (how much more regular can you get?) or irregular (it doesn't follow the regular root, rooted, have rooted rule)?


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Faldage, this is interesting. How far back would we go to see 'to teach' identified as a regular verb?

And what would be examples of the strong (irregular) verbs? To be? Would these be the verbs that completely change form? How many are there?

The verb endings changing, seem to me, completely regular. But when I begin to show the conjugation process, I want to keep it simple as possible, so will introduce some verbs that are quite easy to conjugate. Then I'll move on to what I consider to be regular verbs in which spelling rules dictate some slight changes, such as in 'to change.' After we've covered those, I'll move on to what I think of as being irregular verbs--but, wow!, to read here from you that 'to teach' has been classified as regular is quite a surprise.

Anyway, if you care to write anything else about this topic, I would be very interested in learning more.


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you could call 'em, "conjugular" verbs...



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One example of the strong verb would be OE scrinc(an), scranc, scrunc(on), the MnE shrink, shrank, shrunk, with pretty much the same pronunciation in OE as in MnE, slight differences in the vowel sounds that aren't important to this topic. The sc in OE was almost always pronounced as MnE sh.

While shrink has stayed as it was in OE there are some that have changed considerably.. One good example is sneak. Most (if not all) grammarians today would call it a regular (weak) verb, but in OE it was strong. The forms were snīc(an), snāc, snic(on), which, as near as I can guess, would be sneak, snoke, snick(en) in MnE.

Note: I am using the ^ over a vowel to indicate a macron, not available in any font I know of.

My main sources here are A Guide to Old English by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson and A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by J.R. Clark Hall. The latter is also available in scanned form on line at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/oe_clarkhall_about.html


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>: I am using the ^ over a vowel to indicate a macron, not available in any font I know of.

If you want macronised fonts, I have three of them, I just can't seem to get them to display here, so I don't use them much.


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