1207: Germanic Strong Verb Classes Mar 20, 2018

There's a lot to say about strong verbs, but one thing that is comes up from time to time is the similarities and differences between them. Most strong verbs are said t be regular, in that hey follow a pattern but clearly 'ride, rode, ridden' is a different system to 'sing, sang, sung'. In fact, in English there are seven systems identified for them. Generally, these differences usually regard either the etymologies or phonology, such as the '-i-, -a-, -u-' (sometimes '-i-, -u-, -u-') mentioned before which come before a nasal consonant, such as is the case with 'sing' and 'swim'. All of the other ones (six out of seven categories) also have the participial form with '-(e)n', like 'freeze, froze, frozen' or 'shake, shook, shaken'. Often, because there is such variety of these systems, they are thought of as not having regularity, but this is not true.

These will be discussed more here in coming days.

Read all of the series that finished yesterday about the perception of colors and language.