Irregular Verbs

by Mignon Fogarty via Grammar Girl

Why do we say we saw a movie instead of we seed a movie, and did you know that the past tense of the verb “help” used to be “holp” instead of “helped”?

Regular Verbs Versus Irregular Verbs

Most of the time you add -ed to a verb to put it in the past tense; “slurp” becomes “slurped,” “scarf” becomes “scarfed,” and “offend” becomes “offended,” for example. When you make a verb past tense back tacking on an -ed, you’re dealing with a regular verb. It’s the regular way we make things past tense.

English also has verbs that don’t follow this pattern: verbs such as “am,” which becomes “was”; “tell,” which becomes “told”; and “sing,” which becomes “sang.” These are called irregular verbs because they don’t follow the regular pattern.

People who grew up speaking English just know the irregular verbs, but children and people who are learning  English as adults struggle with them. As toddlers are learning the language they often say things such as “He breaked my doll,” instead of “He broke my doll,” and “Daddy goed to the store,” instead of “Daddy went to the store,” and adults who are learning English are faced with memorizing a long list of irregular verbs.

The Root: Old English Irregular Verbs

Irregular verbs are relics from the past. Believe it or not, the rules for conjugation (a fancy word for “working the verb”) were even more complicated Old English. Our regular verbs are called “weak verbs” in Old English, but Old English also had at least seven different kinds of strong verbs. Many of our irregular verbs are holdovers from those seven types of strong verbs (1), which is why you can’t see any one pattern when you look at a list of irregular verbs. There are actually multiple sparsely represented patterns. For example, “teach” and “catch” become “taught” and caught,” “choose” and “freeze” become “chose” and “froze,” and some verbs don’t change at all: “Hit”* and “quit” stay “hit” and “quit” in the past tense (2).

The Role of Foreigners Learning English Irregular Verbs

Over time, English became simpler and many verbs were regularized. Languages become simpler when a lot of foreigners learn the language as adults, especially when they’re just learning by listening to everyday interactions and don’t have formal books and classes (3) as would have been the case between Old English and Modern English.

And researchers noticed something really interesting about which verbs stayed irregular and which verbs changed to become regular: the more often a word is used, the more likely it is to stay irregular. In fact, every one of the 10 most common English verbs is irregular:

“I am” –> “I was”
“I have” –> “I had”
“Do you?” –> “Did you?”

These are all easy words: single syllable words from Anglo-Saxon origins (4). Besides “be,” “have,” and “do,” they are “go,” “say,” “can,” “will,” “see,” “take,” and “get.”

Irregular Verb Evolution

Researchers at Harvard found a strong correlation between how often a verb is used and whether it regularized (1, 5). They think these 10 common verbs held on to their irregular form so firmly precisely because they’re so common. They actually compared the process to biological evolution, in which changes–mutations–in the most important genes are the least likely to propagate.

Think about how often you hear the verbs “am” and “have” in everyday conversation. “I have to go now. I am hungry, and I have a headache.” If you’re learning English just by listening, these are going to be the easiest verbs to learn properly because you hear them over and over again.

But if you were someone learning English in the Middle Ages dealing with words you don’t hear very often–”to chide,” for example–you may not be able to remember that the past tense is “chode,” and instead you’d just default to the regular rule and say “chided” on the rare occasions when you need the word; or you wouldn’t have learned the verb and wouldn’t know to correct your children when they defaulted to the regular form. Once enough children grew up thinking “chided” was the normal form of the verb, “chode” was doomed.

Strange Exceptions

Finally, there’s a nuance and a couple of exceptions to this verb-evolution process that are worth talking about just because they’re so strange and interesting.

“Burned” Versus “Burnt”

First, verbs don’t always evolve at the same rate in different countries. As far as I can tell, nobody knows why, but British English speakers have held on to irregular verbs more than American English speakers, which is why they say “dreamt,” “burnt,” and “learnt” in Britain, and we say “dreamed,” “burned,” and “learned” in America.

“Sneaked” and “Snuck”

Second, there are a few rare verbs that were regular but have taken on an irregular past tense. It’s like evolution going in reverse. “Sneaked” is the regular past tense form of the verb “to sneak,” but sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, “snuck” started sneaking into English (6).

“Lighted” and “Lit”

Sometime after 1800, people began to prefer the irregular verb “lit” to the regular past tense “lighted” (7). “Lit and “lighted” both currently exist as fully acceptable past-tense forms of “to light.” “Snuck” is still considered slightly less than acceptable, but according to the Harvard researchers, 1% of the English-speaking population switches from “sneaked” to “snuck” every year, with the shift being most powerful in America.

Summary

The bottom line is that you either know the irregular verbs because you absorbed them by growing up in an English-speaking country or you have to memorize them, which is a pain. But if you have to memorize them, I hope you at least find it more interesting now that you know you’re digging into the relics of English, and that one reason these irregular verbs still exist is that English learners in the past could remember them.

Mignon Fogarty is Grammar Girl and the author of the new book, Grammar Girl Presents the Ultimate Writing Guide for Students, available online, in bookstores, and this fall, through Scholastic book fairs.

References

1. Lieberman, E. et al. “Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language,” Nature, vol. 449, no. 7163, p. 713-716, October 11, 2007.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2460562/ (accessed September 13, 2011).
2. “English Irregular Verbs,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs (accessed September 13, 2011).
3. McWhorter, J. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, Gotham Books, 2008.
4. Stephen Pinker “The Irregular Verbs,” http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html (accessed September 13, 2011).
5. Michel, Jean-Baptiste et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science, vol. 331, p. 176-182, January 13, 2011. http://mfi.uchicago.edu/publications/papers/Science_Culturomics.pdf (accessed September 13, 2011).
6. Gellene, D.  “How English adds the ‘-ed’” Los Angeles Times,  October 11, 2007. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/11/science/sci-verbs11 (accessed September 13, 2011).
7. Yong, E. “The Culture Genome: Google Books Reveals Traces of Fame, Censorship, and Changing Languages,” Discover Magazine. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/16/the-cultural-genome-google-books-reveals-traces-of-fame-censorship-and-changing-languages/ (accessed September 13, 2011).

Shtick, Pavilion and other great words

By Dr Sima Barmania via The Independent

On Tuesday, those short listed for the prestigious Man Booker prize gathered in West London with the great and good of the literary establishment. As discussions ensued regarding the merit of the Judges’ decision, Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 prize, was succinct in highlighting that the main prerequisite is that they only be “good writers.”

Last week, Jacobson, who studied English at Cambridge, wrote in The Independent that he simply “wanted to make sentences, not win prizes” Stating that the sentences “were prize enough in themselves.”

Jacobson does indeed create undisputedly great sentences, but also, noticeably, uses great words; for example “shtick,” a word I had never previously encountered, or perhaps never noticed. Thus, not only has the reader been introduced to a beautiful sentence, but also a charming word.

The message “you don’t have to be a writer to appreciate words” is something that the founder of wordsmith.org Anu Garg’s 1 million followers, of which I am one, already take heed of, he tells me.

Each day, Garg e-mails his community of subscribers who reside in over 200 countries, a word of the day, together with the etymology and an example of the word’s use in context.
He provides this service free of charge and has been praised by the New York Times as “the most welcomed most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace.”

Perhaps, what is most fascinating is Garg’s background. He is an immigrant born and raised in Uttar Pradesh in Northern India who later moved to America. He did not begin learning English until the age of 9, in 6th grade, where growing up he learnt the British version and after moving to the United States switched to American English.
Garg, despite his lexicon of words, still considers himself a “lifelong student of the English Language.”  Communicating with Garg, I was keen to understand how his Indian roots had influenced, both him and others.
“In India there’s huge competition to succeed. People realize that good education is the key that opens doors to a better life.” This has resulted in India’s growing literacy levels and a burgeoning book market.
I asked Garg of how best to encourage young people, from all social classes in the United Kingdom, to take an interest in words. He replied, rather endearingly that it would “help if we shared the etymology. Once you see words as living beings: words are born, they grow and change, and sometimes they die out, they become much more than just words”.

To explain further:
“When you see that ‘pavilion’ is like a butterfly spreading its wings (from Latin papilio: butterfly) it’s easy to fall in love with words.”
It is apparent that Garg is more than just a purveyor of words; he is fervently enthusiastic and genuinely enthralled by them.
Furthermore, he does not underestimate the significance of words, but rather acknowledges them as valuable tools: “Words are the universal currency of humankind. The better we are with them, the better we can be in anything we do. With the right words we can do what money or power can’t.”
Some, like Jacobsen may prize great sentences, but others, myself included, are simply pleased with a great word.

Language Forensics

By Ben Zimmer via The New York Times

IMAGINE, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out e-mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It’s a safe bet he never would have guessed that eight years later a multibillion-dollar lawsuit might hinge on whether he capitalized the word “Internet,” or whether he spelled “cannot” as one word or two.

But that is exactly the kind of stylistic minutiae being analyzed in a lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia, owner of a wood-pellet fuel company in upstate New York. Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mr. Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune. He has backed up his claim with e-mails purported to be from Mr. Zuckerberg, but Facebook’s lawyers argue that the e-mail exchanges are fabrications.

When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail — or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author’s idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?

The law firm representing Mr. Zuckerberg called upon Gerald McMenamin, emeritus professor of linguistics at California State University, Fresno, to study the alleged Zuckerberg e-mails. (Normally, other data like message headers and server logs could be used to pin down the e-mails’ provenance, but Mr. Ceglia claims to have saved the messages in Microsoft Word files.) Mr. McMenamin determined, in a report filed with the court last month, that “it is probable that Mr. Zuckerberg is not the author of the questioned writings.” Using “forensic stylistics,” he reached his conclusion through a cross-textual comparison of 11 different “style markers,” including variant forms of punctuation, spelling and grammar.

But Mr. McMenamin’s report has raised eyebrows in the forensic linguistics community. Earlier this month, the outgoing president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, Ronald R. Butters, publicly questioned whether Mr. McMenamin could actually establish that Mr. Zuckerberg likely did not write the e-mails based on such slender evidence. For example, the would-be Zuckerberg e-mails had one instance of uncapitalized “internet,” while a sample of e-mails known to be sent by Mr. Zuckerberg had two capitalized instances of “Internet.” “Are we really doing ‘scientific’ and ‘linguistic’ analysis at all when we simply note instances or absences of this or that superficial textual feature?” Mr. Butters asked.

Some experts are more optimistic. Carole E. Chaski, president of Alias Technology and executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence, has taken on what she terms “the keyboard dilemma,” that is, “the problem of identifying the authorship of a document that was produced by a computer to which multiple users had access.” She has developed computer software that categorizes grammatical structures as “marked” and “unmarked”: an unmarked noun phrase, for instance, has its main noun at the end of a simple phrase (“our marriage,” “a divorce”), while a marked one has the noun in the beginning of a phrase (“anything you ask”) or in the middle (“the rest of our lives”). These aspects of a writer’s syntax are relatively stable across different styles of writing, Ms. Chaski argues. They are also less prone to technological intervention — compared to spelling and punctuation, which can be changed on the fly by spell-check and autocorrect features.

Recently, a team of computer scientists at Concordia University in Montreal took advantage of an unusual set of data to test another method of determining e-mail authorship. In 2003, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, as part of its investigation into Enron, released into the public domain hundreds of thousands of employee e-mails, which have become an important resource for forensic research. (Unlike novels, newspapers or blogs, e-mails are a private form of communication and aren’t usually available as a sizable corpus for analysis.)

Using this data, Benjamin C. M. Fung, who specializes in data mining, and Mourad Debbabi, a cyber-forensics expert, collaborated on a program that can look at an anonymous e-mail message and predict who wrote it out of a pool of known authors, with an accuracy of 80 to 90 percent. (Ms. Chaski claims 95 percent accuracy with her syntactic method.) The team identifies bundles of linguistic features, hundreds in all. They catalog everything from the position of greetings and farewells in e-mails to the preference of a writer for using symbols (say, “$” or “%”) or words (“dollars” or “percent”). Combining all of those features, they contend, allows them to determine what they call a person’s “write-print.”

Many linguists, however, would challenge the notion that the “fingerprint,” a supposedly unique identifier, can be metaphorically applied to writing. Surely we all have our own written quirks and mannerisms — I tend to overuse em-dashes, for instance. But there is just too much internal variability in any person’s body of writing to imagine that we could take just a bit of it — a handful of e-mails — and recognize some sort of linguistic DNA. That is all the more true when it comes to digital genres like text messages, instant messages and tweets, full of unusual spellings and innovative abbreviations, and often sensitive to the type of device we’re using.

Still, these new quantitative approaches hold out the hope of at least differentiating one author from another with a reasonable degree of confidence. This can provide the kind of reliable foundation for research that forensic stylistics as traditionally practiced cannot. Hmm, or is that “can not”?

Reading Group

The Learning English channel on the BBC features a regular series called The Reading Group, where they bring together students of English, literature teachers, and other contributors from the world of books to share their enthusiasm for reading.

If you’d like to share your experiences of reading books in English as a foreign language, you can join the BBC Learning English group on Facebook. Topics on the Discussion board are linked to the subjects covered in The Reading Group programs.

(The series – first broadcast in 2002 – was produced by Amber Barnfather and presented by Gary Stevens.)