Irregular verb
In contrast to
regular verbs,
irregular verbs are those
verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of
conjugation in the
languages in which they occur.
What counts as an irregular verb is strongly dependent on the language itself. In
English, the surviving
strong verbs are considered irregular. In
Old English, by contrast, the strong verbs are usually not considered irregular, at least not only by virtue of being strong verbs: there were several recognised classes of strong verbs, which were regular within themselves.
(For more details, see English irregular verbs.)In
Latin, similarly, most verbs outside the first or fourth
conjugations have three
principal parts, which form part of the
lexicon and must be learned. The three principal parts are the
present tense stem, the
perfect tense stem, and the
past participle; a variety of inflections,
ablaut, and sometimes
reduplication are used to form these parts. For example, the principal parts of
spondeo ("I promise") include
spopondi ("I promised"), showing reduplication, and
sponsus ("promised"); these forms cannot be predicted from the present stem, but when you know all three, the entire system can be constructed from these three parts by rule. This verb is not usually considered irregular in Latin. Latin also exhibits
deponent verbs, inflected in the
passive voice alone; and
defective verbs, missing some principal parts. Truly irregular verbs in Latin are a rather small class; they include
esse ("to be");
dare and its derivatives ("to give");
êsse ("to eat");
ferre and its derivatives ("to carry");
velle and its derivatives ("to wish");
ire and its derivatives ("to go"); and
fieri ("to become"). Most irregular Latin verbs are themselves vestiges of the
athematic conjugations of
Indo-European, a surviving (and regular) group found in
Greek.
Greek and
Sanskrit show even greater complexities, with widely different
thematic and athematic inflection sets; which set goes with which verb stem cannot be predicted by rule. In languages of this type, these variations are not usually enough to label a verb "irregular". They instead form a part of the
lexicon; when a verb is learned, the various patterns used to conjugate it must also be learned.
By contrast, in
modern English, the strong verbs are largely a closed and vestigial class. (
Analogy has created a few new strong verbs, such as
dive.) All of the surviving strong verbs differ markedly from other verbs, and thus are classified as "irregular"; here, they are conspicuous exceptions in the midst of a much larger class of rule-bound regular verbs.
In some languages, the count of irregular verbs could be greatly expanded if one were to count verbs that are irregular only in their spelling, but not in their pronunciation. For example, in
Spanish, the verb
rezar ("to pray") is conjugated in the present subjunctive as
rece,
reces,
rece, etc. The substitution of
c for
z does not affect the pronunciation. It is strictly a matter of
orthography. Therefore, this verb is not normally considered irregular.
Other issues affecting the count of irregular verbs in various languages are:
* How many patterns of conjugation are considered standard. If a large enough group of irregular verbs in a language have parallel conjugations, it is arbitrary whether to count that as an additional "standard" conjugation or as a large collection of irregular verbs.
* Which verbs are to be counted as separate, rather than merely prefixed. For example, in English,
to withhold conjugates exactly like
to hold, and in Spanish,
detener ("to detain") conjugates exactly like
tener ("to have"). In each case, are these to be counted as two separate irregular verbs, or as a single irregular verb, with and without a prefix?
While the term "irregular verb" is not precisely enough defined to allow a definitive count of the irregular verbs in all languages, the following table is illustrative of how much this phenomenon varies across languages.
| Language | Count! Notes |
|---|
| Latin | 924 | |
| Italian | over 400 | |
| English | 283 | |
| German | 170 | |
| Afrikaans | 2 | The remaining irregular verbs are becoming archaic, and will very soon be out of date and replaced by regular verbs. |
| Dutch | Over 300-350 | |
| French | 81 | |
| Spanish | 46 | |
| Welsh | 11 | |
| Finnish | >=4 + 4 | Only the verb olla "to be" has one truly irregular ending (added with some consonant assimilation), and a few verbs have rare consonant elision patterns warranting memorizing them. For example, juoks+en "I run" elides 'k' to give juos+ta "to run", and näh+dä "to see" elides 'h' to give nä+en "I see". Spoken Finnish has further irregularity on the verb "to be" (oo- pro ole-, also occasionally o pro on), and four additional irregular verbs (tuu "come", mee "go", paa "put", nää "see"). |
| Japanese | >=5 | する suru "to do", 来る kuru "to come", 行く iku "to go", ある aru "to exist (inanimate)", and くれる kureru "to give (to the in-group)" are irregular. There are also several categories of verbs with either a very small number of members (the five honorific verbs), multiple possible conjugations (-zuru/-jiru), or conjugations which appear to be based on multiple stems (aisuru "to love" becomes aiseru instead of *aidekiru in the potential); these are considered by some authorities irregular and by others not.) |
| Chinese | 1 | 有 y'u forms its negative with 没 méi rather than with 不 bù in Mandarin and has a separate negative form 冇 mou in Cantonese |
| Northern Sami | 1 | Only the verb leat "to be" is irregular; all others are conjugated regularly. |
| Turkish | 1 | only the verb to be is irregular olmak |
| Esperanto | 0 | (like most constructed languages) |
| Latvian | 3 | these 3 verbs are būt, iet, dot |
* Germanic languages
**
Wiktionary list of irregular English-language verbs**
A list of irregular German verbs; notes are in German**
Learn English verbs effectively **
List of irregular English verbs and exercises* Romance languages
*
**
The Catalan-language Wikipedia article on irregular verbs includes a list of irregular Catalan verbs.
**
Orbis Latinus notes on irregular Asturian verbs**
Orbis Latinus list of irregular French verbs**
Orbis Latinus list of irregular Italian verbs**
Orbis Latinus list of irregular Occitan / Provençal verbs **
Orbis Latinus list of irregular Portuguese verbs**
Orbis Latinus list of irregular Spanish verbs**
Orbis Latinus list of irregular Venetan verbs**
Italian: list of principal irregular second and third conjugation verbs* Other Indo-European languages
**
PDF on irregular verbs in the Greek New Testament
