The ablaut tag has no wiki summary.
2
votes
1answer
113 views
“Goose”–“geese” vs,. “moose”–“moose”
Why is it that the plural of one goose is geese but the plural of moose is moose? Same goes for house and louse. The plurals are houses and lice, respectively.
36
votes
7answers
2k views
Was “book” to “beek” as “foot” is to “feet”?
"Foot" is a curious word in English because it is pluralized in an unusual way; the "oo" in the word is changed to "ee". Did this once use to be a standard way of pluralizing things in English (or a ...
9
votes
2answers
427 views
Evolution of irregular verbs over the last century
I learned at school that irregular verbs are slowly disappearing from the language: "spelled" is more used than "spelt", "learned" than "learnt", etc. But recently, someone told me that some new ...
2
votes
3answers
2k views
Past participle of “spit” [closed]
Which is the past participle of spit: spat or spit? And how many examples can we come up with where a verb is changed in the simple past but unchanged(spelt like in the present) in the past ...
5
votes
1answer
1k views
“Awoken” vs. “awaked”
I understand that the verb awake has two different past participle forms, awoken and awaked. Checking Google Ngram I saw that the former has become more popular than the latter in the last century. I ...
-1
votes
1answer
498 views
Irregular verbs in English
The English language has a huge number of irregular verbs(~470). This is significantly more than other languages e.g. French (~130), German (~200)
Irregular verbs make the English language ...
27
votes
5answers
1k views
Is it possible for a new irregular verb to appear in English language?
Consider these verbs in past tense:
faxed, emailed, googled
they are all regular verbs made out of new nouns.
Are there any new irregular verbs that I'm not aware of?
8
votes
2answers
525 views
Regular vs. irregular verbs
I recall an English teacher explaining that verbs that change vowels during tense changes were called 'regular' and those that added '-ed' in the past tense were 'irregular'. This seemed ...
5
votes
2answers
1k views
Strong verbs, weak verbs, and other categories
For verb conjugations, I know that in English we have certain verbs which umlaut ablaut in their principle parts:
sing-sang-sung
We have verbs that add an -ed to the end:
laugh-laughed
and ...
1
vote
1answer
226 views
Why do some “ing” verbs change tense to “ung” while others go to “inged?” [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Origin of different past tenses for verbs with the same endings?
Spring has sprung, the bell we had to ring was rung, the sting was stung but when I had to ping a ...
