Talk:Regular and irregular verbs

message: Why were the English modals all removed from the list? VV 08:32, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modals 

message: :This has even been observed in languages constructed to not have exceptions.  The few people who are native speakers of Esperanto have, after only one generation, been observed to use contractions that have created a group of irregular verbs.
Could we have a citation for this, please? - Montréalais 22:10, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I bet they say tas for estas.  Chameleon 22:30, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: 'kay, but do they say something other than "tis, tos, tus, tu," etc? or do they just use the uncontracted forms? neither case would really be what's commonly thought of as an irregular verb. - Montréalais 23:05, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: If they only do it in the present, that would make an irregular verb.  Chameleon 01:00, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Esperanto

message: :: And now I see someone has deleted the number for Spanish (23), arguing that it is way too low. Of course, it's all a matter of how irregular a verb has to be to be considered irregular: Spanish has a lot of slightly irregular verbs, often groupning into patterns that constitute a sort of secondary regularity.
:::I just counted the number of verbs included in the list of irregular and defective verbs in the Gramática de la Lengua Española de Emilio Alarcos Llorach, (1994) Real Academia Española,  and he listed 615 irregular and defective verbs. I may be wrong in my counting a very few more or less, but Torrego, in his Gramática didáctica del español  , also lists around 600 irregular verbs (honestly, I didn't count the list of Torrego so accurately as the other one). But, even when they both listed that amount of irregular verbs, as much as I have read, neither of them dare to assume and declare an exact number of irregular verbs in Spanish. Actually, I realized that both lists do not have exactly the same verbs. Besides, Torrego divides the Spanish verbs in 57 different conjugations, three of them regular, while Alarcos divides them into groups and subgroups depending on the kind of irregularities the verb have (phonological, graphic, accents, vocal deletion, irregularities on the root of the verb, especial irregularities (ser, estar e ir) and defective verbs.  --Javier Carro 13:36, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Spanish

message: "English has 283 irregular verbs".  Really?  Where did we get this figure?  It's spuriously accurate.  You can't possibly give a figure because (1) many verbs have both regular and irregular forms, (2) some verbs are regular in one dialect (British or American) and irregular in the other, (3) some verbs have forms which are irregular but archaic, while other, now normally irregular verbs have archaic regular variants, (4) do you count "redo" as irregular, and if so, where do you stop?  I noticed that our list of irregular verbs contains "redo" and several other "re-" words, but it by no means includes all of the "re-" and "mis-" irregulars which actually exist in the language.  Basically, you simply can't give a figure. (unsigned)
: The history shows that I'm responsible for bringing this factoid over from the corresponding article in the German-language Wikipedia. While their scholarly standards are generally a notch up from the English-language, in this case it looks like they had no citation at all. It looks like it was in the initial version of the article, created by :de:Benutzer:4tilden, a rathre active user. That would probably be the best person to ask for a source. I agree that the number suggests precision beyond any possible accuracy, but if it comes from a decent source, it's still worth something if a citation is added as to whose estimate it is. -- Jmabel | Talk 02:30, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)
:: Could someone get some numbers from citable sources? The actual number of irregular verbs in a language is, inevitably, controversial, but the number counted by a particular linguist with a particular methodology is not. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:55, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)
:::In his book Words and Rules, Steven Pinker reports 150 to 180 irregular verbs exist in modern English, "depending on how you count". -- Schaefer 20:29, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: English

message: The article says "All English irregular verbs are native, originating in Old English. ... All loanwords from foreign languages are regular."  I believe "shrive" is an exception, sort of - it's a borrowing from Latin scribere, but was already borrowed into Old English. Reuben 21:33, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Dude. That is SO not funny. Matt Yeager 00:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irregular verbs borrowed into English 

message: The table says there are 11 irregular verbs in Welsh. What are they? bod, gwneud, mynd, dod, cael… what are the other six? It would be good to have this information in the table. 207.245.124.66 16:05, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: ...or to have it in the Welsh language article, or one linked from there. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:14, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

text: My guess is that it includes the -bod compounds like gwybod, adnabod, and others that have additional inflected tenses or otherwise partial stem changes like the ones seen in bod. I'll add a few things about them at Welsh morphology. Strad 02:13, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Welsh 

message: Could someone who has the knowledge please post an opinion on whether there actually are any irregular verbs in Turkish or not? Some people who study the language told me that there was one such a verb - "olmak" = "to be" - so I am puzzled about this. Google gives pages for both possibilities, though mentions of no irregular verbs in the language are more frequent there. Plus, the Guiness Book of records mentions Esperanto as the only language with no irregular verbs, which would make it impossible for Turkish to have no irregular verb as well (though I think the Guiness-entry may easily be challenged). Blahma 08:40, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irregular verbs in Turkish 

message: Some reference to this humorous group should be made - the most well known example is 'I am firm, you are obstinate, he/she is as stubborn as a mule' - ie positive and two increasingly negative terms. Jackiespeel 21:42, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Punning irregular verbs

message: As I understand from French, there are about 66 families of irregular verbs, and there are 13 ways to conjugate regular verbs in -er, and one way for the usual -ir. On top of that, there are more than 50 verbs that doesn't fit anywhere. It appears to me the total of 81 irregular verbs is far from the truth, half of all verbs appear to be irregular.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Souris2005 (talk • contribs) 03:54, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  French irregular verbs 

message: The section of this article containing the table of numbers of irregular verbs is unhelpful and misleading, it is unsourced and never can be sourced, and it is original research conducted without a proper research methodology. I propose the whole section be deleted. Given that irregularity means quite different things in different languages, I doubt that there are meaningful comparisons to be made here, except within limited subgroups (e.g. comparing German with Dutch, where the phenomena bear comparison).  All the figures conceal underlying subjective choices, like whether a French -re verb is irregular or whether you are looking at British or American English (dived/dove) or whether buk as the past tense of German backen is archaic.  Besides which, I'm not sure that an exact number is worth having in any case.  OK, it's 276 - so what?  I suppose if some linguist could be found who has attempted to do this on a proper scientific basis, his results could be included, but I doubt if this has ever been done because it is kind of a sensationalist approach to thinking about language and I doubt real linguists would be particularly interested in it.  So let's just get rid of it.  In its place, you could write up a properly thought-out description of irregularity in some of the languages, and if what you want is a general impression of which languages tolerate larger numbers of irregular verbs, that could be indicated without the pretense of absolute numbers.  --Doric Loon (talk) 10:24, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, since the proposal has gone unchallenged for a fortnight, I hereby delete the section. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:45, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal to delete numbers section

message: Would it be appropriate to have a few words about the humorous "irregular verbs"? Of the sort, "I am a gourmet, you are a gourmand, he is a pig", "I am casual, you are messy, he is a slob"? TomS TDotO (talk) 13:33, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Humorous "irregular verbs" 

message: I don't remember ever making a personal comment in a talk page before, but the person who wrote the "Yes Minister", "Punning Irregular Verbs" and "Humorous Irregular Verbs" comments (and I am guessing that they are all from the same person) doesn't seem to have a clue what he/she is talking about and perhaps could stop adding these comments.
216.36.132.66 (talk) 19:28, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I hadn't noticed the other two comments making the same suggestion that I did - some 4 years earlier. I can understand that someone would not think much of this form of humor. But it does seem to be as significant as "knock knock" jokes or shaggy dog stories, which have treatments in Wikipedia. But if there isn't any interest in it, I have no intent on pushing for it. TomS TDotO (talk) 19:59, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Not to belabor a point, but the examples you give have nothing to do with irregular verbs.216.36.132.66 (talk) 16:10, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

text: TomS, you are quite right that different sorts of jokes are encyclpedic. But it really doesn't belong here. Perhaps you could look at some of the existing articles on humour and see where it can be written up. If you do that, I would see no objection to having a "see also" comment at the bottom of this page pointing to it. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:14, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

text: 216.36.132.66, everyone is entitled to talk. --Doric Loon (talk) 18:15, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with your point. But I will note that I am not the one to write up anything about it. I don't have any reliable sources to cite, just to mention one thing. In fact, I came to Wikipedia looking for information about this kind of joke. TomS TDotO (talk) 18:39, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  If you don't know what you are talking about, don't talk 

message: It's proposed to merge regular verb and irregular verb into a single article. Please see Talk:Regular verb. Victor Yus (talk) 12:11, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge

message: example words of participle of regular verbs
:Sorry, I don't understand.  Are you requesting something?  The article already gives an example of this for English ("talked"). --Doric Loon 08:42, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a question of verb valancy.  To my mind, comprise must have a direct object, though the passive to be comprised of does have a preposition.  But people do use such things in a variety of ways.  --Doric Loon 17:08, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Yup. List of English irregular verbs  --Doric Loon 13:19, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Undecided. Since regular and irregular define themselves with reference to each other, a single article would make sense if it is managable, but we would want two articles if we have so much to say about each that separate discussions would be meaningful. The problem is that at present these two overlap, and in particular there is quite a lot of material on irregular verbs in this Regular Verb article.  That suggests that we are not keeping these separate anyway.  I suggest we first rationalise the two articles, and we may find the Regular Verb article is reduced to a stub which should be merged.  --Doric Loon 05:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The result of the merge would be Regular and irregular verb (like Even and odd functions is the unique article for even functions and odd functions). 16@r 10:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

text: All right, I'm going to go ahead with this. All the information is preserved at the target page (it will be rewritten somewhat by way of cleanup). Transferring the contents of this talk page as well. Victor Yus (talk) 11:09, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Merged from [[Talk:Regular verb]]

message: I need to understand that, can the verb "comrpise" be followed by the preposition "of" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.200.197.65 (talk) 07:05, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a question of verb valancy.  To my mind, comprise must have a direct object, though the passive to be comprised of does have a preposition.  But people do use such things in a variety of ways.  --Doric Loon 17:08, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  use of the verb comprise 

message: I´m brasiliam and I´m doing level intermediate and I would like to know if have a complete list of the irregular verbs...
: Yup. List of English irregular verbs  --Doric Loon 13:19, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: List

message: I say don't.  They are two entirely different things, and as such, require two entirely different articles. Jmlk17 23:43, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Undecided. Since regular and irregular define themselves with reference to each other, a single article would make sense if it is managable, but we would want two articles if we have so much to say about each that separate discussions would be meaningful. The problem is that at present these two overlap, and in particular there is quite a lot of material on irregular verbs in this Regular Verb article.  That suggests that we are not keeping these separate anyway.  I suggest we first rationalise the two articles, and we may find the Regular Verb article is reduced to a stub which should be merged.  --Doric Loon 05:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  The result of the merge would be Regular and irregular verb (like Even and odd functions is the unique article for even functions and odd functions). 16@r 10:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

text: All right, I'm going to go ahead with this. All the information is preserved at the target page (it will be rewritten somewhat by way of cleanup). Transferring the contents of this talk page as well. Victor Yus (talk) 11:09, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge

message: Siri 112.200.0.149 (talk) 14:17, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Regular and irregular verbs