470: Strong Verbs Mar 22, 2016

"Sing, sang, sung" are some forms of one of many verbs which would prove useful to anyone who wished to confuse children and non-Native speaker. English is full of these exceptions––right‽ Nope; this is not an exception. Verbs like this, in which the stem changes to show tense instead of having suffixes added (like 'd' or 't'), are called "strong-verbs". Strong-verbs tend to follow similar patters, such as the past tense of all these words having an 'a': 'swam', 'sang', 'rang', 'began', 'ran' and so forth. Almost all of these kinds of verbs date back to the patterns of Old English conjugation.