Irregular Verb list

ajrojo said:

Pls help me to find a list of 620irregular vebs with present, past tense and past participle with definitions and i really need it asap. Why this link :Log In - UsingEnglish.com didnt not exist. pls I need your response asap!

Thank you!

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Hi, the members' area version of the irregular verb list has now been fixed. Thanks for letting us know. :up:

Log In - UsingEnglish.com

I don't think I've ever seen a more comprehensive list of irregular verbs.
:-D:up:

To be honest I always hated learning irregular verbs. But on the other hand there are nost so many as you may have thought. Many of them are contained in the others . For example : hear is in overhear, hold in behold, take in betake etc.etc so you only have to teach 3 forms for hear,hold,take etc. Of course their meaning is another thing

Many are formed by adding prefixes to other verbs, but they're included for the sake of, erm, inclusivity. And then again, they don't always adhere rigidly to the original pattern- input has both irregular and regular forms, the irregular one from tradition and the regular one from the modern tendenc y to make all new verbs regular. My own favourites dight and bedight, neither of which I have ever heard used.

my teacher told me that there is 930 irregular verbs

d-money said:

my teacher told me that there is 930 irregular verbs

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Hi d-money,
it is worth asking your teacher and sharing with the community, don't you think?!

Regards

Sanmayce said:

it is worth asking your teacher and sharing with the community, don't you think?!

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Lawks-a-mercy!

You mean you want another 300 like abey, bedight, begird, behight, blaw, bowstring, cleek, clepe, crib-bite, dight, dispread, dow, engird, farebeat, fordo, forefeel, forlese, hagride, hight, hoise, lep, misbecome, naysay, reave, redd, tine, wit ?

fivejedjon said:

Lawks-a-mercy!

You mean you want another 300 like abey, bedight, begird, behight, blaw, bowstring, cleek, clepe, crib-bite, dight, dispread, dow, engird, farebeat, fordo, forefeel, forlese, hagride, hight, hoise, lep, misbecome, naysay, reave, redd, tine, wit ?

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Exactly, that's what is called comprehensiveness, right?
Here, I see you lack a vision other than your own, it clowds some very important (for others) ways of presenting info needed on a daily basis.

One of my very useful ways of seeing things is to look even through eyes of an illiterate person or a person with very limited skills. 'To turn a handicap into advantage' , something like that.

Sanmayce said:

Exactly, that's what is called comprehensiveness, right?

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I can't argue with that.

What does "to tine" mean and how do you conjugate it, 5jj? I can't find it in the dictionaries.

birdeen's call said:

What does "to tine" mean and how do you conjugate it, 5jj? I can't find it in the dictionaries.

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I had never heard of it before I followed the link in post #10. It is in my OED with the UsingEnglish meaning, but in Webster's Third it appears to mean lose, waste, perish become lost.

Here it is: Tine Tint/Tined Tint/Tined To shut

Has anyone ever heard brung being used instead of brought? :shock:
Scary stuff.

GreyMan said:

Has anyone ever heard brung being used instead of brought? :shock:
Scary stuff.

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I have. "Dance with the one who brung ya."

birdeen's call said:

I have. "Dance with the one who brung ya."

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I find it shocking when people are so careless.
I see you speak Polish. It reminds of a number of Polish colleagues I had in Glasgow. Those poor people were being taught real English in their classes. But the stuff most people speak for real is a whole other story. They really had a hard time of it in the beginning.

GreyMan said:

I find it shocking when people are so careless.

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It's not careless. It's either dialect, or it's done for (humorous) effect.

I see you speak Polish. It reminds of a number of Polish colleagues I had in Glasgow. Those poor people were being taught real English in their classes. But the stuff most people speak for real is a whole other story. They really had a hard time of it in the beginning.

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If what is spoken for real by most people is different from what is being taught in the classroom, then it seems to me that theere is something wrong in the classroom.

Sorry, but considering what I'm referring to you're mistaken. I'm well aware of some regional or humorous examples. But in Glasgow (there'll be other examples of such an attitude) there are lots of people who take pride in being illiterate. So "careless" is putting it nicely.

I couldn't agree with you more when you say that conventional classes are often inadequate. But I'm referring specifically to pronunciation. The Polish people certainly had a good understanding of English, that was clear from the way they spoke it. But they couldn't make out what the locals were saying. That being the case because many locals wouldn't even try to speak clearly. They would shout louder and louder but not even attempt to pronounce things correctly.

GreyMan said:

Sorry, but considering what I'm referring to you're mistaken.

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Do you mean that I am mistaken about 'brung'? I don't think there are many people who would use that form through 'carelessness'.

I'm well aware of some regional or humorous examples. But in Glasgow (there'll be other examples of such an attitude) there are lots of people who take pride in being illiterate.

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Are there really lots of people in Glasgow who take pride in being unable to read and write? Do you know what the literacy figures for Glasgow are? Have you any evidence to support your claim that Glaswegians take pride in being illiterate?

....But they couldn't make out what the locals were saying. That being the case because many locals wouldn't even try to speak clearly. They would shout louder and louder but not even attempt to pronounce things correctly.

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Do you mean that the locals would insist on speaking their own Scottish dialect, rather than adopting a southern English one? I don't really think that is unreasonable. Most of us speak with our own accent/dialect.

Lighten up, for goodness sake! That word was just an example. And I'm not talking about e.g. older people from a remote area but younger city folks who have access to education.

Yes, there are plenty who brag about being uneducated and never touching books. No, I don't have the contact details for anyone with that attitude, nor did I record any stuch statement. But you hear it said often enough, and it's easy to deduce from other things.
I'm not sure how many are fully illiterate. But you could always look up relevant statistics if it matters to you. It's an officially recognized problem.

As a resident of Glasgow I'm well familiar with the various speech patterns and attitudes. There's nothing wrong with noticeable regional accent. There are enough people with such accents working even as TV presenters. Which means the accent doesn't stop them from being intelligible.
Not to mention, when you realize someone is struggling to understand you, common decency would make you act in a considerate way rather than shout at the person.

Plus, I did say there must be enough other examples. Don't bother claiming I'm picking on anyone. I actually started a thread here asking for tips on getting rid of my own accent.
It was just an easy, ready real-life example, nothing exclusive.

It is certainly true that Poles and other non-native speakers may have a lot of trouble confronting the English language with its different accents and dialects after listening to trained actors from tapes or CDs at school. But that is nobody's fault. Not the natives' and not the non-natives'. This is just how things are. English has extremely many varieties which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, phraseology and what have you. The speakers of those varieties grow up learning English from their parents who learned it from theirs and so on, all of them being also subject to different and ever-changing influences from all over the English speaking world. Southern English speakers happen to use the form "brung" sometimes. I do not know the historical reasons for that and perhpas nobody knows for sure. John Algeo writes in The Cambridge History of the English Language: English in North America:

In Modern English, the standard past tense and past participle have always been brought. One can, however, find ample attestations on both sides of the Atlantic of the forms brang and brung. Certainly there must have been settlers throughout the Colonial period who said brang or brung instead of brought. These speakers doubtless influenced the younger people with whom they came into contact, thus promoting brang and brung at the expense of brought. However, there are strong indepentent linguistic reasons why brang and brung would have arisen even if all of the original settlers said only brought. Brought is a highly irregular form -- almost no verbs in English change so drastically between the present-tense form and the past and past participle. Furthermore, there are other, phonologically very similar verbs which pattern in almost exactly the way that bring/brang/brung do: ring/rang/rang, sing/sang/sung, swim/swam/swum, and drink/drank/drunk. Analogy is a powerful force for linguistic change, and highly irregular forms are likely to change, often as the result of child-language-acquisition having nothing at all to do with dialect borrowing. In the end, one must say that the original dialect forms brang and brung persisted in the New World but that both the original forms and the normal processes of linguistic change must have contributed to this persistence.

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According to Jerzy Wełna's Weak-to-strong: A shift in English verbs?[\i]

The Old English PT/PP of the strong verb bringan are unrecorded.

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I'm not really sure what he means by that. He writes earlier on

bring (OE bringan): PT brang (Old English; formed to match the present tense on the analogy of SV3): PP brungen (Old English; rare; later, together with brung confined to dialects).

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Anyway, Bosworth-Toller Dictionary gives use the following sentence:

He ða býsene from Gode brungen hæfde. (He had brought the mandates from God.)

So it looks like it has actually been recorded.

Etymological musings aside, people speak the way they speak. I'm too old to learn Chinese so I don't like the idea of being ridiculed for not speaking like most people.

birdeen's call: That's very informative. I would never ridicule regional quirks or people who had no access to education.

For example, in some parts people say "I'm very busy like." Technically the word "like" is wrong there, but it's just part of the tradition in a way.
But in recent years you have younger people in most English speaking countries saying e.g. "I'm like late." There's no excuse for that. It's not regional, it's wrong, it makes no sense and it's spreading.
Stuff like that reduces the quality of the language.

You're not too old for anything that interests you. My mother recently developed an interest in Hindi. I'm trying to encourage her to indulge her fascination. No reason not to.

PS: I'm also guilty of saying saying I've ran, or worse I've went sometimes.