Other irregulars like ‘dream’ and ‘learn’ are gradually becoming regular. Nor are they likely to come across ‘abide’/’abode’. Most modern children don’t know the word ‘cleave’ or that its past is ‘clove’. The number of commonly used irregular verbs is declining. In fact many of the grammatical mistakes commonly made by native speakers – ‘we was’, ‘they done’ etc. Some never learn that nobody ever ‘writ’ anything (as opposed to ‘wrote’). It takes children years to learn to use ‘spoke’ and not ‘speaked’. Irregular verbs are notoriously difficult for language learners – native speakers struggle with them, too. The “rules became opaque to children and eventually died the irregular past tense forms are their fossils.” He says that irregular verbs are “fossils of an Indo-European pre-historic language.” This had a regular rule in which one vowel replaced another. The psychologist, Steven Pinker, has an interesting theory. So how have these tricky customers evolved? And why are they so central to English? They punch above their weight *, however, making up 70% of the verbs in everyday use. There are around 180 irregular verbs in English – a small fraction of the many thousands of regular ones. Do you notice what they have in common? They are all irregular. Here are the ten most heavily used verbs in the English language: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get. Kieran McGovern considers why some verbs in English are so difficult for language learners to grasp and how they have changed (and continue to change) over time.
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