So “fill” become “fill did”, which transformed over time to “filled”.

The Germanic languages added a rule that these new verbs would become past tense by adding a “did” after the verb. In more recent history, the ancient Germanic language began to create new verbs from nouns and adjectives (for example the adjective “full” became the verb “to fill”). And the verbs within “to be” are made up of multiple original verbs: “am, is, be, was”. For example, the past tense of “go” came from the archaic verb “wend”. There are some common irregulars, however, that are made up of multiple verbs. Most of our present day irregulars continue that pattern of vowel change. Laura Wright discuss that in the Indo-European language, past tense verbs were formed with a vowel change (such as modern “swim -> swam”). You can listen to the entire episode here. There was so much to learn that I listened to the episode three times to try to absorb it all. The theme of the episode was the origin and future of irregular past tense verbs.

Last May, I listened to a truly fascinating podcast. In fact, Erez Lieberman, a graduate student at Harvard University stated in this article that, “The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 percent of the language.” well irregular!Īccording to, the top five irregular verbs in English are: to be, have, do, say, go. How many of your students are working on irregular past tense verbs? If your caseload looks like mine, it is probably a quarter of your students that struggle in this area.

What are irregular verbs