English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes
Posted: April 14th, 2024, 7:08 am
I am reading a book on a linguistic theory called Construction Grammar by Thomas Hoffman called “Construction Grammar - The Structure of English”
It just covered some of the oddities of English irregular verbs such as (awake - awoke, draw - drew, fly - flew, get - got, run - ran, go - went etc)
Some of these are more irregular than others, but they cannot have their past tense predicted by standard rules of past tense formation (the addition of a d sound at the end eg kiss - kissed). He notes that reference grammars state there are 250+ such irregular verbs in the English language; we just had to learn these past tense forms as discrete words.
I would be interested in hearing from folks who know other languages or who are versed in typological theories. To me this means that the change in aorist stems on occasion in Greek shouldn’t be considered something that is a complete aberration and idiosyncrasy of the Greek language. Rather it is something that crosses language and should be expected, even if an occasional annoyance. Is this a fair assessment, given that English and a bit of Greek are my only knowledge so far
English even has irregular noun forms, such as leaf - leaves, movie - mice, goose - geese just to keep the pesky 2nd language learners guessing
It just covered some of the oddities of English irregular verbs such as (awake - awoke, draw - drew, fly - flew, get - got, run - ran, go - went etc)
Some of these are more irregular than others, but they cannot have their past tense predicted by standard rules of past tense formation (the addition of a d sound at the end eg kiss - kissed). He notes that reference grammars state there are 250+ such irregular verbs in the English language; we just had to learn these past tense forms as discrete words.
I would be interested in hearing from folks who know other languages or who are versed in typological theories. To me this means that the change in aorist stems on occasion in Greek shouldn’t be considered something that is a complete aberration and idiosyncrasy of the Greek language. Rather it is something that crosses language and should be expected, even if an occasional annoyance. Is this a fair assessment, given that English and a bit of Greek are my only knowledge so far
English even has irregular noun forms, such as leaf - leaves, movie - mice, goose - geese just to keep the pesky 2nd language learners guessing