Word: irregulars
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Kids say the darnedest things. "We holded the baby rabbits." "The alligator goed kerplunk." "Horton heared a Who!" These lapses, you might dimly recall, have something to do with irregular verbs. But please don't stop reading just yet. Children's errors are not just anecdotes for grandparents or reminders of long-forgotten grammar lessons. They're windows into the workings of language, history and the human mind...
...when an irregular word is still fresh in the mind, it is fragile. If a child's memory cannot cough up held quickly enough, he or she adds -ed by default and says holded instead...
...Irregular and regular verbs embody the two underlying tricks behind the gift of articulate speech: words and rules. A word is a memorized link between a sound and a meaning. The word duck does not look, walk or quack like a duck. But we can use it to convey the idea of a duck because we all once learned to connect the sound with the idea...
Regular and irregular verbs today have their roots in old border disputes between words and rules. Many irregulars can be traced back over 5,500 years to a mysterious tribe that came to dominate Europe, western Asia and northern India. Its language, Indo-European, is the ancestor of Hindi, Persian, Russian, Greek, Latin, Gaelic and English. It had rules that replaced vowels: the past of senkw- (sink) was sonkw...
While children use the rules of conjugation to create the correct forms of all regular verbs, he argued, they must memorize the forms of all irregular verbs. The most common irregular verbs, such as "be," "go" and "have," are never regularized because they are so common...