Why is there irregular verbs

Each entry starts with a simple explanation and some basic examples before giving real-life, entertaining examples. Every entry ends with a summary explaining why the grammar point matters to a writer. If you like Grammar Monster, you'll love this book. Practical rather than academic, this best seller is packed with real-life examples and great quotations from Homer the Greek to Homer the Simpson.

It is a light-hearted, easily digestible grammar reference. What are Irregular Verbs? There are about irregular verbs in English. Books are full of verbs in their past forms, so reading is a really useful way to practice and review.

Your Wall Street English Center probably has some books available for you to borrow Focus on learning a few irregular verbs at one time Join complementary classes and social club activities at Wall Street English to get extra practice in using regular and irregular verbs.

It also seems fairly obvious to me that irregular conjugations learnt at an early age will tend to be preserved. For example, in later life, I'm sure I read learned more often than learnt in contexts like the previous sentence, but that hasn't significantly affected my usage. It's important to note that I personally don't feel threatened by the possibility that my use of English might be considered non-standard or uneducated.

Children soon notice how regular verbs work, so they naturally generate "incorrect" past tense forms such as eated, taked, rided. Obviously with less common verbs, firstly the child is less likely to use them, and secondly there's a greater chance that the parents aren't familiar with the "correct" but irregular forms.

So they get corrected less often, and with the passage of generations, the irregular forms can gradually die out. Thus it seems only natural that the most tenaciously-preserved irregular forms will mostly be very common verbs learnt in early childhood. Old habits die hard , and all that.

One answer is that it might be easier to learn verbs where distinct meanings correspond to distinct form, e. The frequent use of these verbs might then act to preserve this association of form and meaning. Thus it's not surprising that several of the verbs you quote have different roots in different tenses or persons in many European languages.

Another deviation from 'regular' morphology would be the verbs that retain a specific form of conjugation that is no longer productive, e.

I'm not sure if I would call this pattern irregular though -- maybe their continued survival highlights that the coexistence of several different patterns in the same language is not really a problem but rather a very natural phenomenon.

In general, verbs that tend to be irregular in English are "borrowed" from OE or other languages and have retained elements of their original conjugations. Notice that these verbs are important in the sense that they usually describe common, everyday human activities. I do not know where the regular conjugation we now use comes from. Our brains have evolved to seek patterns, hence children tend to over-regularize; I suspect adults would do the same thing were it not for the rules of grammar.

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Learn more. Why are so many important verbs irregular? Ask Question. Asked 8 years ago. Active 7 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 16k times. In many languages, including English, the most important verbs are irregular. Examples include: to be to do to get to go to have to make The same applies roughly to many other languages I know about Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Swedish and presumably to many other languages too.

This is exactly why our students struggle so much with the less common irregular verbs. Memorizing uncommon irregulars is difficult both for native and non-native speakers. Children with a language disability are most likely to only know the most common irregulars. That is also why children with a language disorder typically do not error on common irregulars had, said, went because they have heard them so many times that they are memorized.

As speech-language pathologists, we spend a good deal of time helping students learn verb tenses, especially irregular verbs. It would be wonderful if all verbs followed one pattern for tense changes.

However, due to the complex history of language and linguistic evolution, English as well as other Germanic languages has multiple ways of forming its past tense verbs. It is up to teachers, parents, and SLPs to consistently expose children to the exceptions until they are memorized. It is also important for children to work on irregular verbs. When exposed repeatedly, they will begin to form the neural pathways to memorize these verbs.