Irregular Verbs Quotes

English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey—just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.

He was just alive," [Gansey] said helplessly. "He just taught us four irregular verbs last week. And you killed him.

Kugelmass, unaware of this catastrophe, had his own problems. He had not been thrust into Portnoy's Complaint, or into any other novel, for that matter. He had been projected into an old textbook, Remedial Spanish, and was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ("to have") - a large and hairy irregular verb - raced after him on its spindly legs.

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.

Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.

Sorry about your sausage dog.

Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular.

As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of life: I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy parker.

Professor Dr Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld often reflected on how fortunate he was to be exactly who he was, and nobody else. When one paused to think who one might have been had the accident of birth not happened precisely as it did, then, well, one could be quite frankly appalled.

Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”: I create, You interfere, He gets in the way. We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.

If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have "Jacobs" be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

Caitlyn, s’il vous plait!” Madame said, whacking the blackboard with her stick, its end pointing to the irregular verb devoir, “to have to.” She wanted Caitlyn to conjugate it. Caitlyn felt the class’s attention turn to her, and a clammy sweat broke out in her armpits. Her brain stopped in its tracks, unable to move under the pressure. A vague sense of having known how to speak French in her dreams tickled at her brain, but the skill was as lost to her in the waking world as was Raphael. “Devoir,” Caitlyn croaked. “Er. Je dev? Tu dev?” Madame gaped at her, horrified. Caitlyn shook her head; she knew those words were wrong. “Er … I mean, uh …” And then out of nowhere came, “Egli deve, lei dovrebbe …” These words felt right. He must, she must … Several girls burst into laughter. “What?” Caitlyn demanded. “You’re speaking Italian!” one girl shrieked, and collapsed into hysterical giggles.

we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.

You’ll move on, too,” I said. “Everybody’s looking for love.

At one stage in the history of English, the past tenses of verbs were marked by a regular vowel change process; instead of “help/helped,” we had “help/holp.” Over time, -ed became the preferred way to mark the past tense, and eventually the past tense of most verbs was formed by adding -ed. But the old pattern was preserved in verbs like “eat/ate,” “give/gave,” “take/ took,” “get/got”—verbs that are used very often, and so are more entrenched as a linguistic habit (the very frequently used “was/ were” is a holdover from an even older pattern). They became irregular because the world changed around them.

Okay.First things first. Three things you don't want me to know about you." "What?" I gaped at him. "You're the one who says we don't know each other.So let's cut to the chase." Oh,but this was too easy: 1. I am wearing my oldest, ugliest underwear. 2.I think your girlfriend is evil and should be destroyed. 3.I am a lying, larcenous creature who talks to dead people and thinks she should be your girlfriend once the aforementioned one is out of the picture. I figured that was just about everything. "I don't think so-" "Doesn't have to be embarrassing or major," Alex interrupted me, "but it has to be something that costs a little to share." When I opened my mouth to object again, he pointed a long finger at the center of my chest. "You opened the box,Pandora.So sit." There was a funny-shaped velour chair near my knees. I sat. The chair promptly molded itself to my butt. I assumed that meant it was expensive, and not dangerous. Alex flopped onto the bed,settling on his side with his elbow bent and his head propped on his hand. "Can't you go first?" I asked. "You opened the box..." "Okay,okay. I'm thinking." He gave me about thirty seconds. Then, "Time." I took a breath. "I'm on full scholarship to Willing." One thing Truth or Dare has taught me is that you can't be too proud and still expect to get anything valuable out of the process. "Next." "I'm terrified of a lot things, including lightning, driving a stick shift, and swimming in the ocean." His expression didn't change at all. He just took in my answers. "Last one." "I am not telling you about my underwear," I muttered. He laughed. "I am sorry to hear that. Not even the color?" I wanted to scowl. I couldn't. "No.But I will tell you that I like anchovies on my pizza." "That's supposed to be consolation for withholding lingeries info?" "Not my concern.But you tell me-is it something you would broadcast around the lunchroom?" "Probably not," he agreed. "Didn't think so." I settled back more deeply into my chair. It didn't escape my notice that, yet again, I was feeling very relaxed around this boy. Yet again, it didn't make me especially happy. "Your turn." I thought about my promise to Frankie. I quietly hoped Alex would tell me something to make me like him even a little less. He was ready. "I cried so much during my first time at camp that my parents had to come get me four days early." I never went to camp. It always seemed a little bit idyllic to me. "How old were you?" "Six.Why?" "Why?" I imagined a very small Alex in a Spider-Man shirt, cuddling the threadbare bunny now sitting on the shelf over his computer. I sighed. "Oh,no reason. Next." "I hated Titanic, The Notebook, and Twilight." "What did you think of Ten Things I Hate About You?" "Hey," he snapped. "I didn't ask questions during your turn." "No,you didn't," I agreed pleasantly. "Anser,please." "Fine.I liked Ten Things. Satisfied?" No,actually. "Alex," I said sadly, "either you are mind-bogglingly clueless about what I wouldn't want to know, or your next revelation is going to be that you have an unpleasant reaction to kryptonite." He was looking at me like I'd spoken Swahili. "What are you talking about?" Just call me Lois. I shook my head. "Never mind. Carry on." "I have been known to dance in front of the mirror-" he cringed a little- "to 'Thriller.'" And there it was. Alex now knew that I was a penniless coward with a penchant for stinky fish.I knew he was officially adorable. He pushed himself up off his elbow and swung his legs around until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. "And on that humiliating note, I will now make you translate bathroom words into French." He picked up a sheaf of papers from the floor. "I have these worksheets. They're great for the irregular verbs...

I have these worksheets. They're great for the irregular verbs..." "Not today." He shot me a look and kept shuffling papers. "Okay," I said. "D'accord.Pas de papiers aujourd'hui. S'il vous plait,Alex. Je...je fais les choses la derniere fois." "Prochaine." "What?" "La prochaine fois," he correct. "Next time. Derniere fois is 'last time.' I'm not even going to start on your verb usage." "Right.La derniere...sorry...prochaine fois. How do you say 'I'm begging you'?" "Jes t'en supplie," he answered. Then, "You are aware that in order to speak better french, you actually have to speak French." "Oui,monsieur. But the Eiffel Tower will still be standing next week, and french fries will still be American." "Belgian," Alex sighed. "French fries started in Belgium. Look,I'm not going to force you to work. It's your choice and not my job." "Next week," I promised. "I promise." "Right." He rubbed the back of his head, pushing his hair into a funny little ducktail. "Okay,fine. How 'bout a movie?" Worked for me. "Sure.

Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and prefer nouns more than other parts of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies from place to place (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, by 18 months, Englishspeaking infants speak far more nouns than verbs compared to Chinese or Korean infants. Why? One explanation goes back to the language itself. The Chinese and Korean languages are “verb-friendly” in that verbs are placed at the beginning or end of sentences. That facilitates learning. By contrast, English verbs occur anywhere in a sentence, and their forms change in illogical ways (e.g., go, gone, will go, went). This irregularity may make English verbs harder to learn, although the fact that English verbs often have distinctive suffixes (-ing, -ed) and helper words (was, did, had) may make it easier (Waxman et al., 2013).

There was a boy at our school. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular verbs, there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an honour to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a clever man, and had all those sort of weak-minded ideas. I never knew such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn. Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn’t go to school. There never was such a boy to get ill. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he had it, and had it badly. He would “take bronchitis in the dog-days, and have hayfever at Christmas. After a six weeks’ period of drought, he would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a November fog and come home with a sunstroke. They put him under laughing-gas one year, poor lad, and drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear-ache. He was never without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever; and he always had chilblains. He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and hot-house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn’t let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him. And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school life for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give our parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldn’t catch so much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good, and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till the term recommenced; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.

Word lessons in particular, the wouldst-couldst-shouldst-have-loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of the French, Latin, and English grammars to memory, and in connection with reading-lessons we were called on to recite parts of them with the rules over and over again, as if all the regular and irregular incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry. In addition to all this, father made me learn so many Bible verses every day that by the time I was eleven years of age I had about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh. I could recite the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Revelation without a single stop. The dangers of cramming and of making scholars study at home instead of letting their little brains rest were never heard of in those days. We carried our school-books home in a strap every night and committed to memory our next day’s lessons before we went to bed, and to do that we had to bend our attention as closely on our tasks as lawyers on great million-dollar cases. I can’t conceive of anything that would now enable me to concentrate my attention more fully than when I was a mere stripling boy, and it was all done by whipping,—thrashing in general. Old-fashioned Scotch teachers spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the new-fangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays.

There are two basic groups of German verbs...strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don't follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on your own terms...Like people,...The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are the same.

Sometimes changes in language behaviour do not seem to be explainable in terms of a gradual build-up of fluency through practice. These changes have been described in terms of restructuring (McLaughlin 1990). They seem to be based on some qualitative change in the learner’s knowledge. Restructuring may account for what appear to be bursts of progress, when learners suddenly seem to ‘put it all together’, even though they have not had any new instruction or apparently relevant exposure to the language. It may also explain apparent backsliding, when a systematic aspect of a learner’s language incorporates too much or incorporates the wrong things. For example, as we saw in Chapter 2, when a learner finally masters the use of the regular -ed ending to show past tense, irregular verbs that had previously been used correctly may be affected. Thus, after months of saying ‘I saw a film’, the learner may say ‘I seed’ or even ‘I sawed’. Such overgeneralization errors are not based on practice of those specific items but rather on their integration into a general pattern.

Von Igelfeld was not sure. He remembered reading that Hume believed that our minds vibrated in sympathy, and that this ability – to vibrate in unison with one another – was the origin of the ethical impulse. And Schopenhauer’s moral theory was about feeling, was it not; so perhaps they were one and the same phenomenon.

STRONG VERB a German verb whose stem changes its vowel to form the imperfect tense and the past participle. Its past participle is not formed by adding –t to the verb stem. Also known as irregular verbs. Compare with weak verb.

How complex this world is, he thought; how easily may things appear to be one thing and then prove to be another. And how easy it was to see the worst

But the pull of the first-syllable pattern is strong. And plenty of verbs waver between second- and first-syllable stress. What about research? (“Did you REsearch the question? Did you resEARCH the question?”) Transform? (“Did it TRANSform your understanding? Did it transFORM your understanding?”) And there are plenty of paired nouns that seem to be in the midst of this wavering too (my REsearch/resEARCH, my ADdress, my adDRESS). Even some of the late borrowings that are clearly French (homage, mustache, perfume) can go either way. In many later borrowings, the British and American stress preferences differ.

The noun failure came much later, in the seventeenth century. It was formed in English from the verb faillir, but the end syllable was confused with a different suffix, -ure in words like figure, pressure, and closure. Due to this confusion, faillir became failure. But before that the gerund form failing was used as the noun, in failing of teeth, failing of eyes, failing of the spirit, and also without (any) failing. For a while, there was also another noun form, faille, taken directly from French. Sans faille meant without fault, lack, or flaw, and it worked its way into medieval English along with other common set phrases like sans doute, sans délai, crier merci, en bref, au large, par cœur. We made the words more English but kept the basic structure: without a doubt, without delay, cry mercy, in brief, at large, by heart.

The graven of graven images doesn’t even have a corresponding verb anymore. It was originally from the Germanic root that became graben in German and grafan in Old English and meant dig or engrave. In the sixteenth century, English, under the influence of French, which had itself borrowed the Germanic root and formed engraver out of it, started using engrave as the verb and jettisoned the original—except in the case of graven images, where the old past participle lives on as an adjective in one, very specific, biblical context.

Besides this, the grammatical forms and constructions in Russian are very peculiar, and present a great many strange irregularities. As an illustration of this we may take the future tense. The Russian verb has commonly a simple and a frequentative future. The latter is always regularly formed by means of an auxiliary with the infinitive, as in English, but the former is constructed in a variety of ways, for which no rule can be given, so that the simple future of each individual verb must be learned by a pure effort of memory. In many verbs it is formed by prefixing a preposition, but it is impossible to determine by rule which preposition should be used. Thus idu (I go) becomes poidu; pishu (I write) becomes napishu; pyu (I drink) becomes vuipyu, and so on.

Driveway was formed with the verb to drive in the late 1800s. This was before the automobile, and drive was something you did with a carriage or team of animals. A driveway might also be called a carriageway, horseway, or cartway. At the time, no one would have thought of its primary purpose as a place to park anything. Its purpose was to provide room for vehicles to move, not stand still. That’s what a barn or carriage house was for. It wasn’t until later, with the development of private home driveways leading from the street to a house or garage and the spread of automobiles, that it became standard to park in a driveway.

above all, simplify the French language and abolish irregular verbs – a measure that would have rescued countless schoolchildren from the despotism of pernickety pedagogues.

Mrs. Scamler,’ she said, ‘do you study French, ma'am?’ ‘I do, indeed,’ I said; ‘two hours a day.’ ‘Then, ma’am,’ she says, ‘we call upon you to give it up.’ ‘Give it up!’ I said. ‘Why should I give up what your daughter does?’ for I knew her daughter learnt French at school. ‘Because, ma’am,’ she said, ‘it can’t be for no good end, and if it were people wouldn’t believe it. My daughter learns French at school. But what for? Because it’s an accomplishment that all girls have. They take it like the measles and the chickenpox; but do you suppose they go on having it after they’re done school? No; and if a grown woman takes the measles, it’s bad on her; and if a widow takes to learning French we know what that means.’ ‘It’s a very immoral language,’ said the school-masters wife, for she hadn’t paid the butcher’s bill for six months, as I happened to know. ‘Shocking,’ said the chemist’s wife. ‘I knew a woman who read French, and she ran away from her husband, and died of consumption. For it’s in the language. My husband says its rotten and corrupt, and he ought to know, being a chemist by examination. Mrs. Scamler, you need a pill or a draught or something, for I declare you look quite dissolute already.’ And me only beginning irregular verbs!

If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis, "he deserved all he got.

Bobby, when he saw his father, had retreated a few steps back, as also did Grace, who, to confess the truth, had been attracted by the sound of sugar-plums, in spite of the irregular verbs. And Lucy withdrew her hand from her muff, and looked guilty. Was she not deceiving the good man — nay, teaching his own children to deceive him? But there are men made of such stuff that an angel could hardly live with them without some deceit. “Papa’s gone now,” whispered Bobby; “I saw him turn round the corner.” He, at any rate, had learned his lesson — as it was natural that he should do.

Von Igelfeld wondered whether there was a moral obligation to read a letter. Surely the moral principles involved were the same as those which applied when somebody addressed a remark to one. One does not have to answer; but inevitably does.

We were all of us alone, kept wrapped up tight by our sins.

Is your life really so bad? This city is full of opportunities –” “Can you call it a city?” Marcus asked. “No gymnasium, no theatre, no forum? Where is the life a Roman man should lead?

I saw then how I could be a good Buddhist and a good chef, and serve meat that is given freely, without suffering.

Concentrate on the text for the moment: the other parts will fall into place in time.

There are plenty of people who might prefer to go sideways. What about them? How are we to inspire them?

I was never told and I never caught on that a laboratory could teach you new facts and insights; I regarded it as just one of those chores (like irregular verbs in German and finger exercises for the piano) that the world assigns to apprentices before allowing them to become journeyman.

irregular verbs.

Whatever language Death speaks is not ours; and most of us spend no time acquiring the complex grammar, in which every verb is irregular and only the past tense obtains, until it is too late