Timeline for Why do some irregular verbs, such as swing/swung and sting/stung, only have two forms instead of three?
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| Feb 16, 2023 at 8:39 | comment | added | BoldBen | @releseabe Chinese doesn't really have tenses in the western sense. The concept we refer to as tense is primarily conveyed by context. What they have is the particle 'le' which means that the action of the verb it follows is complete. This is sometimes presented as a past tense to westerners but it is not. You can have the sentence "Wo kan shu" which means "I read book". But if you say "Zuotian wo kan shu" it means "Yeasterday I read a book" and if you say "Mingtian wo kan shu" it means "Tomorrow I will read a book" if you add 'le' after 'kan' it means that the task is, or will be, complete. | |
| Feb 16, 2023 at 7:30 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | related: Irregular verbs: the history of the suffix “-en” in the past participle | |
| Feb 16, 2023 at 4:33 | answer | added | herisson | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 20:36 | comment | added | David | The majority of the verbs you are referring to are not irregular (as are the verbs to be and to go) but strong. In fact they have a regularity in vowel change that is such that children given nonsense words will construct appropriate forms of the preterite and the perfect. Note also that Germanic words in English are not derived from German, but both are derived from the same proto-Germanic sources. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 20:20 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Feb 12, 2023 at 17:57 | comment | added | Greybeard | As you, I hope, know, lots of English irregular verbs were taken from German, That is a gross and misleading simplification. It also ignores the fact that in Modern German it is, and Old English it was, usual for the past participle to be suffixed by "ge-", thus whether the vowel changed or not, the two could be distinguished. In transitional OE, the "ge-" was lost and some verbs ended up with only two forms - so to speak. | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 17:13 | history | edited | Laurel♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 12, 2023 at 17:05 | answer | added | John Lawler | timeline score: 5 | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 12:36 | comment | added | High Performance Mark | How is "went" the past tense of "go"?? It's called suppletion; went is from a different root than go. As explained at english.stackexchange.com/questions/28514/… | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 7:25 | comment | added | releseabe | I have wondered also about irregular verbs, why sometimes the different tenses do not resemble each other at all. A very good example is "to go." How is "went" the past tense of "go"?? My belief is that while a modern person understands going in the past is just a special case of going, this was not understood when these words were coined. "To be" in both German and English is equally baffling. I believe Chinese deals with tense much more "rationally." | |
| Feb 12, 2023 at 6:27 | history | edited | KillingTime | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 12, 2023 at 6:16 | history | edited | user473457 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| S Feb 12, 2023 at 6:13 | review | First questions | |||
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| S Feb 12, 2023 at 6:13 | history | asked | user473457 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |