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English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes

Posted: April 14th, 2024, 7:08 am
by Matthew Longhorn
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

Re: English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes

Posted: April 15th, 2024, 2:02 am
by Jean Putmans
You are right: In German and Dutch we have strong verbs (vowel-change in stems in different tenses) and weak verbs (using tense-suffixes) and even some verbs with a mix of weak and strong tenses.

Languages are not mathematical constructs, so “irregularities” are the spices of the linguistic-fun!

Re: English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes

Posted: April 15th, 2024, 4:08 am
by Matthew Longhorn
Jean Putmans wrote: April 15th, 2024, 2:02 am You are right: In German and Dutch we have strong verbs (vowel-change in stems in different tenses) and weak verbs (using tense-suffixes) and even some verbs with a mix of weak and strong tenses.

Thanks Jean, that is interesting to know re the German and Dutch
My dad is fluent in Russian and noted that there are also such instances there also
Jean Putmans wrote: April 15th, 2024, 2:02 am Languages are not mathematical constructs, so “irregularities” are the spices of the linguistic-fun!
Totally agree re not mathematical constructs. Part of the reason I posted this here is that I figured it would encourage beginners that Greek is not so different from English in this respect. I found it annoying when first learning Greek

Re: English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes

Posted: April 15th, 2024, 6:59 am
by mikeatnip
The "oddballs" tend to be in the more commonly used words, such as the copulatives. I read once that this occurs because of persistent use, the "old" verbs hang on to the "old" conjugations while the lesser-used verbs tend easier towards simplification ... since languages tend towards simplification as they age. It is my understanding (which could be erroneous) that both the English and the Greek irregular verbs are holdovers from older ways of conjugation, centered mostly on those verbs that get used frequently.

Re: English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes

Posted: April 15th, 2024, 10:51 am
by MAubrey
Yeah, these sorts of irregular verbs, along with sound changes, are a foundational element in historical linguistics and determining language family relations.

Re: English irregular verbs and Greek stem changes

Posted: April 15th, 2024, 3:56 pm
by Mitch Tulloch
Is ablaut (vowel variation) like this also characteristic of languages outside the Proto Indo-European (PIE) family? The Cambridge Grammar has a good description of ablaut in ancient Greek but it doesn't explain why ablaut happens, and I'm not sure if saying that languages tend towards simplification is valid outside the PIE family...any linguists here who can offer more insight?