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.
slurp
burp
barf (or heave)
fry
badger
bother
chuck
rattle
whisper
snort
moo!
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.
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.
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)?
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.
you could call 'em, "conjugular" verbs...
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
>: 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.
Faldage, that was *very interesting. Bartleby hs this to say on the history of weak /strong verbs:
http://www.bartleby.com/68/73/5773.htmlQ: What is the verb hang; (weak/strong/irregular/regular) -hang-hanged-hung. Is it all of them?
And, maahey, another fascinating link. We are apparently a bit lazy with our verbs, aren't we, or, to put a positive spin on it, we prefer the simple, direct route, weak though it may be.
Oooh. This hang, hanged/hung thang is a whole nother question involving transitive and intransitive verbs. It is more clearly illustrated in light and shine, but, still, a whole nother question, and one that I have done a small amount of inconclusive research on.
a little peek into the past.
My head is so full of gerunds/ duratives/ intransitives/ causatives..., that I am merely posting the link with no further comment. It was a good thread to read though and rather heartening to know that the board has not changed much, in its idiosyncratic character, since.
http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=19694
They rather complicated gerunds on that thread. Gerunds are simply 'ing' forms of verbs that function as nouns, plain and simple. A gerund is about as easy to spot as a post oak. One person on that thread mentioned 'candle lighting ceremony'--and in that instance 'lighting' would no longer qualify as a gerund because the function in that nouns phrase was adjectivial. Take any verb, turn it into the present participle form, let it function adjectivially, and you simply end up with a present participle functioning as an adjective; that same 'ing' present participle form of the verb functioning purely as a noun in a sentence is what we call gerunds.
"We went to the candle lighting." Lighting there is a gerund.
"We went to the candle lighting ceremony." Lighting there is a present participle functioning as an adjective.
"We went to the candle lighting." Lighting there is a gerund.
"We went to the candle lighting ceremony." Lighting there is a present participle functioning as an adjective.
Sounds a little picky to me. Does it stop being a noun when it's acting as an adjective? Is an adjectival noun not a noun?
I'd agree with WW, on this Faldage. Lighting in the second sentence is a verb that is used as an adjective for ceremony and is therefore a participle. An example of this word as a gerund might be when referring to it as decor. The lighting in a house or auditorium, for e.g.
Faldage,
Technically speaking according to modern grammar books, a gerund qualifies as a gerund only when it functions as a noun in a sentence and not as a modifier. When the present participle functions as an adjective, the grammar books show it to be just that: present participle functioning as an adjective.
Now things were very much different even a hundred years ago. I should let you borrow my great great grandfather's grammar book that is antebellum. Terms were very much different and by far more numerous.
Let me try this:
Running
I saw a running deer in the meadow behind my house.
The deer is running so the running is a participle.
I entered the third running of the Dinwiddie marathon, finishing in 17 hours 35 minutes 23.86 seconds, a personal best.
Running is used as a noun, so it is a gerund.
They gave me a third-running T-shirt anyway.
The T-shirt is not running. Running is part of an adjectival noun phrase. It is still a gerund.
Good point, Faldage. And the noun phrase functions as an adjective. You still should, I think, give a nod to how the words in the phrase are functioning. Titles, for instance: Much Ado About Nothing. There we have a pronoun functioning as an adjective, a noun, a preposition and a pronoun again functioning together as a noun--a very proper noun, in fact--but that doesn't change the fact that the words that make up the title still are what they are in terms of parts of speech.
Participles can be harder to nail down, but unless you have a case as you showed above, generally 'ing' forms of verbs that modify nouns are going to be participles and not gerunds. Grammarians today would classifying such 'ing' modifiers as present participles and not as gerunds. The case you have shown us is one of those glorious exceptions to the rule, such as it is. But to present the exception as the rule would be misleading. Generally, 'ing' forms of verbs modifying nouns will be participles functioning as adjectives--and then to have lots greater understanding of the flexibility of the language, pull out all those possible exceptions. This is the kind of exercise that I expect gives experts in linguistics papers to write. However, were I to teach my ninth graders that present participles modifying nouns were gerunds, I think I would be leading them astray.
If you want to fervently hold on to the belief that gerunds are adjectives, then I suggest that you begin a letter-writing campaign to the board members on AHD and suggest that they redefine 'gerund.' ('Letter-writing' here has been used as an adjective modifying campaign and not as a gerund.)
my contributions is to an other interesting set of irregular verbs.. like the spring/sprang/sprung...
this is a YART--but its so much fun...
nigh/near/next
i never put them 'together'(i read them somewhere) and i was gobsmacked...
spring them on your students, WW... i suppose only wordies like us are going to be impressed.. but maybe you'll out a wordie, or create one..
Don't overgeneralize me, Dub' Dub. I'm saying that you can't slip an -ing word easily into a pigeon hole just by looking at its position in a sentence. If your candle ceremony were lighting something it might buy lighting as a participle. As it is, I'm sticking by adjectival noun gerund. Fire doesn't suddenly become an adjective because you have stuck it in front of the word hose in the phrase fire hose. It's an adjectival noun. The same with a substantive adjective, as in The Young and the Restless. The fact that those babies are *acting as nouns doesn't make them nouns.
Personally, I think if you try teaching these borderline cases to ninth graders you're going destroy any hope of getting them to like grammar.
This entry from the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar may help:
gerund
The -ing form of the verb when used in a partly noun-like way, as in No Smoking (in contrast to the same form used as a PARTICIPLE, e.g. Everyone was smoking). (Sometimes called verbal noun.)
Both the term gerund, from Latin grammar, and the term verbal noun are out of favour among some modern grammarians, because the nounlike and verblike uses of the -ing form exist on a cline. For example, in My smoking twnety cigarettes a day annoys them, smoking is nounlike in having a determiner (my) and in being the head of a phrase (my smoking twenty cigarettes a day), which is the subject of the sentence; but it is verblike in taking an object and adverbial (twenty cigarettes a day), and it retains verbal meaning.
In other words, there's a continuum where it's pretty obvious what's a gerund at one end and what's a participle at the other, but with a whole lot of uses with mixed features in the middle which are more like or less like each end. Whether you want to point this out to their young innocent trusting minds is another matter.
Bingley