verb paradigms
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Sep 18 10:58:51 EDT 2002
At 7:34 AM -0700 9/18/02, Matthew Ferris wrote:
>It seems that some verbs jump from one paradigm to another in the various
>tenses, that is they may use first aorist forms, but second aorist passive
>forms, for example. GRAFW is a case in point. It uses first aorist
>(EGRAYA) but
>in the aorist passive, it uses the second aorist pattern: EGRAFHN. Is this
>simply because of the stem ending in F, and is there any way of predicting
>when
>a verb will behave like this?
There are some 50-60 verbs whose principal parts you need to memorize; they
are called irregular verbs even though most of their individual paradigms
are perfectly regular; what makes them irregular is precisely that you
cannot predict from the present indicative 1 sg. (and therefore from the
present stem) what any one of the other five principal parts will be. Many
of these verbs are like GRAFW in that their roots are consonants; many
others are sufficiently common in use that they've not shed their more
archaic ways of forming aorist- and perfect-tense stems. There are other
lists of GNT principal parts. I have one based on Mounce's textbook but
with added info available as a downloadable PDF file at
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/docs/IrregularVerbsMounce.pdf
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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