9 ms·

The Irregular Verbs (2000)

150 points by ggreer 12y ago

polynomial 12y ago
The real question is how rule based natural language systems can evolve. Otherwise they are subject to becoming moribund. Of course that's not simply learning the latest usages on the cutting edge of human language evolution. Rather, natural language AI evolves concurrently with the technology people use to communicate, which technology (heavily?) influences their language use. I'd go so far as to suggest the influence of technology on language is more important than historical rules of verbiage and exceptions.
tokenadult 12y ago
As Steven Pinker points out in this very interesting article, the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time, as old, little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed in English are never formed as irregular verbs. For all that, though, "many of the irregulars can sleep securely, for they have two things on their side. One is their sheer frequency in the language. The ten commonest verbs in English (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get) are all irregular, and about 70% of the time we use a verb, it is an irregular verb. And children have a wondrous capacity for memorizing words; they pick up a new one every two hours, accumulating 60,000 by high school. Eighty irregulars are common enough that children use them before they learn to read, and I predict they will stay in the language indefinitely." Cool.
- Cushman 12y ago
  > As Steven Pinker points out in this very interesting article, the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time, as old, little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed in English are never formed as irregular verbs. At least, until we start pronouncing "plated", "played", and "placed" so differently that kids wonder why they're all spelled the same :)
- ketralnis 12y ago
  > the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time I just don't think that's true. English, like all other languages, is in an unbroken line of continuous speech from the first group of humans to use speech at all. (Or if you don't follow the theory of a single origin of language, an origin set of language users.) Where you place the borders between what you call "English" or "Middle English" or "unnamed branch of Old High Saxon spoken by a particularly small group of villages" is fuzzy, but nobody ever decided "What I was speaking 10 minutes ago was Language A but starting now this is called Language B and they're totally different in every way". So we've been developing English for a very long time. If "little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed [are] never formed as irregular verbs", then why do we have still have irregular verbs at all? Why wouldn't they have been wiped out thousands of years ago? In the most obvious cases, English hasn't changed at a uniform rate. It's experienced gradual splits, mergings, conquerings, being alternatingly a vulgar and prestige dialect, immigration, emmigration, wars, trade explosions, and regular old influence of other languages nearby. The claim you're quoting seems to be that if a language is left to its own devices that it will gradually approach regularity. I definitely disagree that point, and there are somewhat well-understood methods for these changes it occur even in an isolated language (for instance, vowel shifts that affect some words more than others, after which words that used to follow the same rule no longer do). But let's set that aside. Even if we ignore the normal linguistic processes that can increase irregularity in an isolated language, what makes us think that the "artificial" events like wars or interactions with other languages will decrease? Why would those things stop?
  - bdr 12y ago
    Presumably, new irregular verbs used to appear, but no longer do. Groups of speakers are less isolated, we have a standardized written language, and demarcations between languages are clearer.
    - ketralnis 12y ago
      > Presumably, new irregular verbs used to appear, but no longer do Why not? Have now we invented all of the words we need, but hadn't yet invented "seen" or "got" in 1200 AD? Then why would it stop now, instead of in 1200 AD? > we have a standardized written language But we've had written language for much longer than English has been around
- lkbm 12y ago
  > but new verbs formed in English are never formed as irregular verbs http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/twote#English http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/twote#English Granted, it's definitely not winning out over "tweeted".
bhrgunatha 12y ago
> Not only is the irregular class losing members by emigration, it is not gaining new ones by immigration. When new verbs enter English via onomatopoeia (to ding, to ping), borrowings from other languages (deride and succumb from Latin), and conversions from nouns (fly out), the regular rule has first dibs on them. The language ends up with dinged, pinged, derided, succumbed, and flied out, not dang, pang, derode, succame, or flew out. I'd love a quick straw poll. Who says flied out? I've only ever heard flew out - I've never heard anyone say "I flied out yesterday."
- Cushman 12y ago
  Context is a fly ball in baseball, a noun. No relation to the common holiday activity.
- akavi 12y ago
  People on planes "flew out". Baseballs, however "flied out".
  - panic 12y ago
    Baseballs have still "flown out", since they fly through the air in the normal sense; it is their hitters who have "flied out".
    - Cushman 12y ago
      In fact, if I understand the rules of baseball, it's only players whose balls fail to fly out who, themselves, fly out!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  It's a baseball term.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ademarre 12y ago
> The ten commonest verbs in English... Until reading that, and subsequently confirming accepted usage, I never would have used commonest as the superlative of common.
- dtech 12y ago
  That's because most common is the commonest: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=most+common%2Ccommonest&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmost%20common%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccommonest%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=most+common%2C...
  - tlb 12y ago
    Only among commoners.
- bhrgunatha 12y ago
  Choosing between more/er and most/est has always seemed quite random to me for two syllable adjectives. The problem with English is that there ALWAYS seems to be an exception to the rule.
  - ubernostrum 12y ago
    Actually, "commonest" seems to mostly be a British English thing, while "most common" is American English, in my experience.
    - mdpye 12y ago
      Really? I've never heard it before, and it was so jarring to read that I came to the comments specifically looking for other people saying so...
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  Speaking of superlatives reminded me of that Old Spice ad 'Freshershist', have you seen it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBV5Jsk6g5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBV5Jsk6g5k
the_cat_kittles 12y ago
i've had a pet theory that irregularity helps memorization. the thought is that when something is deducible rather than arbitrary, you remember the rule, not the result of the rule. when its arbitrary, you just remember it. does anyone know of anything to suggest this is true or false?
- function_seven 12y ago
  Only barely related, but I do know that the speed limit in the parking lot at my local mall is 18 MPH. Not 15 or 20, but 18. And of course the only reason I know that is because they choosed an arbitrary value and not a standard "slow parking lot" value. The fact that the 10 commonest verbs are all irregular seems to agree with your theory,
xefer 12y ago
In an awesome paper [1] published in 2007, it was shown that irregular English verbs have been dying out (i.e., "regularized") at an incredibly precise and measurable rate. The paper shows "how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast." [1] "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language" by Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, [...], and Martin A. Nowak http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2460562/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2460562/
- legulere 12y ago
  I recently felt that effect in an old norse class here in Germany. I had to translate brast into German. Bresta follows the 3rd class of strong verbs (old norse still has more or less rules for the strong verbs): bresta, brast, (brustum,) brostit - to burst, bursted, burst (archaic: to burst, brast, bursten) The same verb also exists in German: bersten, barst, geborsten However it's not that common today and the past tense is also extremely uncommon in speach. This led me inflect it weak (regular).
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    It is still there in Danish: http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=briste&search=S%C3%B8g http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=briste&search=S%C3%B8g "bristede" is the common past tense but "brast" is still used occasionally.
    - Rondom 12y ago
      It is indeed always interesting to see that it is not only the common words but also those little subleties, which are not noticable at the first glance, have survived in the different languages. http://tyda.se/search/brista?lang[0]=en&lang[1]=de&lang[2]=sv http://tyda.se/search/brista?lang[0]=en&lang[1]=de&lang[2]=s...
    - nisse72 12y ago
      In Swedish, "brast" is the common and AFAIK only past tense of this word. Brista brast brustit.
lfender6445 12y ago
I <3 the ending - 'and that is how our youngest irregular, snuck, sneaked in.'
jgalt212 12y ago
Thank God there's only 180 irregular verbs in English. I remember slogging my way through 501 French Verbs in high school to limited success. http://www.amazon.com/501-French-Verbs-Barrons-Language/dp/0764179837 http://www.amazon.com/501-French-Verbs-Barrons-Language/dp/0...
vorg 12y ago
The thing with the most commonest verbs "come" and "go" is they're the same verb but with different directionalities, just as "come" and "came" is the same but with different tenses. Ditto "bring" and "take". So the form irregularity sits not only on the tense but also the direction of movement.
trevelyan 12y ago
I just hope people will eventually stop typing "payed" for paid and "loose" for lose.
- r00fus 12y ago
  What's to say that "payed" won't end up winning in the end? I mean, it's a hell of a lot more logical, pay->payed, than pay->paid. The really amusing part about loose vs. lose is that both have a negative connotation, so the similarity in sense lends a dissonance to the "attuned eye" not unlike two musical notes slightly off pitch played interchangeably. If you want to control language evolution, perhaps you'd prefer the existence of something like the Académie Française and invented words like "courriel"?
  - krrrh 12y ago
    "Courriel" was actually invented by the Office québécois de la langue française. But your point stands. As far as I know the corresponding, and pretty great, word for spam, "pourriel", came from the streets.
ScottBurson 12y ago
> a Boston eatery once sold T-shirts that read "I got schrod at Legal Seafood" Actually it was spelled "scrod". I used to have one of those T-shirts. I believe the full legend was "I got scrod last night at Legal Seafood". Ref.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrod
tempodox 12y ago
Long live the irregulars! Having said that, I would surmise that the past tense of a hockey stick is a tree. I just couldn't say which kind, I'm not an expert.
return0 12y ago
At some point "to google" will be so old, it will become irregular too.
- Someone 12y ago
  You mean like "Yesterday, I giggled"?
  - hessenwolf 12y ago
    Also possibly like geegled, from gögled, or goegled. The old way was for broad vowels to become slender, for either pluralisation of nouns or for thingumming of verbs. A, O, and U would be broad vowels, and I and E slender, and the whole bucket of dipthongs follow somehow. Or should it be that the whole bucket of dipthongs follows? I, personally, support metonymic shifts.
    - return0 12y ago
      does it have to end in -ed? google/gogle/goglen, a-la "choose". e.g: "Googlicity is defined as the ratio of people who gogle your name in the last year over the total number of times you have been goglen."
      - taejo 12y ago
        You're right, strong verbs never get -ed at the end.
ezequiel-garzon 12y ago
If I may take this unique opportunity, does anybody know of a command line tool (say "past") such as wn [1] that could output something like the following? $ past go go went gone I'm talking about a stand-alone program that would work offline. Thanks! [1] https://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/wn.1WN.html https://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/wn.1WN.html
- rmc 12y ago
  dict is installable locally and can use a dict server on localhost to look up words offline/
- acqq 12y ago
  There are only 180 itregular verbs, the script would be trivial to make (not more than 10 minutes in Perl including testing). Tokenadult lists them all here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738342
ajuc 12y ago
If you like irregular verbs so much learn a Slavic language :)
RyanMcGreal 12y ago
> In between blow-blew and grow-grew sits glow-glowed. What a same. I quite like the sound of "glew". It glew with the light of a thousands suns.
kornakiewicz 12y ago
Try Polish! I would say that every word here is irregular (seven cases and three tenses). Few forms of simple "to be": jestem, byłem, będę, jesteś, byłeś, będziesz, jest, był, była, było, będzie, jesteśmy, byliśmy, będziemy, jesteście, byliście, będziecie, są, byli, były, będą. good luck ;)
- felxh 12y ago
  Your comment seems irrelevant - the article never claimed that english has the most (or even a lot of) irregular verbs. If you have some linguistic insights regarding irregular verbs in Polish I would be curious to hear them (I really mean it)
  - troAway98765 12y ago
    Your comment seems irrelevant - the grandparent never claimed that polish has the most (only many) irregular verbs. If you have some pedantic insights regarding relevant comments on Hacker News I would be curious to hear them (I really mean it)

150 points by ggreer 12y ago

The real question is how rule based natural language systems can evolve. Otherwise they are subject to becoming moribund. Of course that's not simply learning the latest usages on the cutting edge of human language evolution. Rather, natural language AI evolves concurrently with the technology people use to communicate, which technology (heavily?) influences their language use. I'd go so far as to suggest the influence of technology on language is more important than historical rules of verbiage and exceptions.

tokenadult 12y ago

As Steven Pinker points out in this very interesting article, the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time, as old, little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed in English are never formed as irregular verbs. For all that, though, "many of the irregulars can sleep securely, for they have two things on their side. One is their sheer frequency in the language. The ten commonest verbs in English (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get) are all irregular, and about 70% of the time we use a verb, it is an irregular verb. And children have a wondrous capacity for memorizing words; they pick up a new one every two hours, accumulating 60,000 by high school. Eighty irregulars are common enough that children use them before they learn to read, and I predict they will stay in the language indefinitely." Cool.

Cushman 12y ago
> As Steven Pinker points out in this very interesting article, the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time, as old, little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed in English are never formed as irregular verbs. At least, until we start pronouncing "plated", "played", and "placed" so differently that kids wonder why they're all spelled the same :)
ketralnis 12y ago
> the category of irregular verbs in English will surely shrink over time I just don't think that's true. English, like all other languages, is in an unbroken line of continuous speech from the first group of humans to use speech at all. (Or if you don't follow the theory of a single origin of language, an origin set of language users.) Where you place the borders between what you call "English" or "Middle English" or "unnamed branch of Old High Saxon spoken by a particularly small group of villages" is fuzzy, but nobody ever decided "What I was speaking 10 minutes ago was Language A but starting now this is called Language B and they're totally different in every way". So we've been developing English for a very long time. If "little used verbs become regularized over time, but new verbs formed [are] never formed as irregular verbs", then why do we have still have irregular verbs at all? Why wouldn't they have been wiped out thousands of years ago? In the most obvious cases, English hasn't changed at a uniform rate. It's experienced gradual splits, mergings, conquerings, being alternatingly a vulgar and prestige dialect, immigration, emmigration, wars, trade explosions, and regular old influence of other languages nearby. The claim you're quoting seems to be that if a language is left to its own devices that it will gradually approach regularity. I definitely disagree that point, and there are somewhat well-understood methods for these changes it occur even in an isolated language (for instance, vowel shifts that affect some words more than others, after which words that used to follow the same rule no longer do). But let's set that aside. Even if we ignore the normal linguistic processes that can increase irregularity in an isolated language, what makes us think that the "artificial" events like wars or interactions with other languages will decrease? Why would those things stop?
- bdr 12y ago
  Presumably, new irregular verbs used to appear, but no longer do. Groups of speakers are less isolated, we have a standardized written language, and demarcations between languages are clearer.
  - ketralnis 12y ago
    > Presumably, new irregular verbs used to appear, but no longer do Why not? Have now we invented all of the words we need, but hadn't yet invented "seen" or "got" in 1200 AD? Then why would it stop now, instead of in 1200 AD? > we have a standardized written language But we've had written language for much longer than English has been around
lkbm 12y ago
> but new verbs formed in English are never formed as irregular verbs http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/twote#English http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/twote#English Granted, it's definitely not winning out over "tweeted".

bhrgunatha 12y ago

> Not only is the irregular class losing members by emigration, it is not gaining new ones by immigration. When new verbs enter English via onomatopoeia (to ding, to ping), borrowings from other languages (deride and succumb from Latin), and conversions from nouns (fly out), the regular rule has first dibs on them. The language ends up with dinged, pinged, derided, succumbed, and flied out, not dang, pang, derode, succame, or flew out. I'd love a quick straw poll. Who says flied out? I've only ever heard flew out - I've never heard anyone say "I flied out yesterday."

Cushman 12y ago
Context is a fly ball in baseball, a noun. No relation to the common holiday activity.
akavi 12y ago
People on planes "flew out". Baseballs, however "flied out".
- panic 12y ago
  Baseballs have still "flown out", since they fly through the air in the normal sense; it is their hitters who have "flied out".
  - Cushman 12y ago
    In fact, if I understand the rules of baseball, it's only players whose balls fail to fly out who, themselves, fly out!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
It's a baseball term.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

ademarre 12y ago

> The ten commonest verbs in English... Until reading that, and subsequently confirming accepted usage, I never would have used commonest as the superlative of common.

dtech 12y ago
That's because most common is the commonest: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=most+common%2Ccommonest&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmost%20common%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccommonest%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=most+common%2C...
- tlb 12y ago
  Only among commoners.
bhrgunatha 12y ago
Choosing between more/er and most/est has always seemed quite random to me for two syllable adjectives. The problem with English is that there ALWAYS seems to be an exception to the rule.
- ubernostrum 12y ago
  Actually, "commonest" seems to mostly be a British English thing, while "most common" is American English, in my experience.
  - mdpye 12y ago
    Really? I've never heard it before, and it was so jarring to read that I came to the comments specifically looking for other people saying so...
TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
Speaking of superlatives reminded me of that Old Spice ad 'Freshershist', have you seen it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBV5Jsk6g5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBV5Jsk6g5k

the_cat_kittles 12y ago

i've had a pet theory that irregularity helps memorization. the thought is that when something is deducible rather than arbitrary, you remember the rule, not the result of the rule. when its arbitrary, you just remember it. does anyone know of anything to suggest this is true or false?

function_seven 12y ago
Only barely related, but I do know that the speed limit in the parking lot at my local mall is 18 MPH. Not 15 or 20, but 18. And of course the only reason I know that is because they choosed an arbitrary value and not a standard "slow parking lot" value. The fact that the 10 commonest verbs are all irregular seems to agree with your theory,

xefer 12y ago

In an awesome paper [1] published in 2007, it was shown that irregular English verbs have been dying out (i.e., "regularized") at an incredibly precise and measurable rate. The paper shows "how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage. The half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast." [1] "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language" by Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, [...], and Martin A. Nowak http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2460562/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2460562/

legulere 12y ago
I recently felt that effect in an old norse class here in Germany. I had to translate brast into German. Bresta follows the 3rd class of strong verbs (old norse still has more or less rules for the strong verbs): bresta, brast, (brustum,) brostit - to burst, bursted, burst (archaic: to burst, brast, bursten) The same verb also exists in German: bersten, barst, geborsten However it's not that common today and the past tense is also extremely uncommon in speach. This led me inflect it weak (regular).
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  It is still there in Danish: http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=briste&search=S%C3%B8g http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=briste&search=S%C3%B8g "bristede" is the common past tense but "brast" is still used occasionally.
  - Rondom 12y ago
    It is indeed always interesting to see that it is not only the common words but also those little subleties, which are not noticable at the first glance, have survived in the different languages. http://tyda.se/search/brista?lang[0]=en&lang[1]=de&lang[2]=sv http://tyda.se/search/brista?lang[0]=en&lang[1]=de&lang[2]=s...
  - nisse72 12y ago
    In Swedish, "brast" is the common and AFAIK only past tense of this word. Brista brast brustit.

lfender6445 12y ago

I <3 the ending - 'and that is how our youngest irregular, snuck, sneaked in.'

jgalt212 12y ago

Thank God there's only 180 irregular verbs in English. I remember slogging my way through 501 French Verbs in high school to limited success. http://www.amazon.com/501-French-Verbs-Barrons-Language/dp/0764179837 http://www.amazon.com/501-French-Verbs-Barrons-Language/dp/0...

vorg 12y ago

The thing with the most commonest verbs "come" and "go" is they're the same verb but with different directionalities, just as "come" and "came" is the same but with different tenses. Ditto "bring" and "take". So the form irregularity sits not only on the tense but also the direction of movement.

trevelyan 12y ago

I just hope people will eventually stop typing "payed" for paid and "loose" for lose.

r00fus 12y ago
What's to say that "payed" won't end up winning in the end? I mean, it's a hell of a lot more logical, pay->payed, than pay->paid. The really amusing part about loose vs. lose is that both have a negative connotation, so the similarity in sense lends a dissonance to the "attuned eye" not unlike two musical notes slightly off pitch played interchangeably. If you want to control language evolution, perhaps you'd prefer the existence of something like the Académie Française and invented words like "courriel"?
- krrrh 12y ago
  "Courriel" was actually invented by the Office québécois de la langue française. But your point stands. As far as I know the corresponding, and pretty great, word for spam, "pourriel", came from the streets.

ScottBurson 12y ago

> a Boston eatery once sold T-shirts that read "I got schrod at Legal Seafood" Actually it was spelled "scrod". I used to have one of those T-shirts. I believe the full legend was "I got scrod last night at Legal Seafood". Ref.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrod

tempodox 12y ago

Long live the irregulars! Having said that, I would surmise that the past tense of a hockey stick is a tree. I just couldn't say which kind, I'm not an expert.

return0 12y ago

At some point "to google" will be so old, it will become irregular too.

Someone 12y ago
You mean like "Yesterday, I giggled"?
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  Also possibly like geegled, from gögled, or goegled. The old way was for broad vowels to become slender, for either pluralisation of nouns or for thingumming of verbs. A, O, and U would be broad vowels, and I and E slender, and the whole bucket of dipthongs follow somehow. Or should it be that the whole bucket of dipthongs follows? I, personally, support metonymic shifts.
  - return0 12y ago
    does it have to end in -ed? google/gogle/goglen, a-la "choose". e.g: "Googlicity is defined as the ratio of people who gogle your name in the last year over the total number of times you have been goglen."
    - taejo 12y ago
      You're right, strong verbs never get -ed at the end.

ezequiel-garzon 12y ago

If I may take this unique opportunity, does anybody know of a command line tool (say "past") such as wn [1] that could output something like the following? $ past go go went gone I'm talking about a stand-alone program that would work offline. Thanks! [1] https://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/wn.1WN.html https://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/wn.1WN.html

rmc 12y ago
dict is installable locally and can use a dict server on localhost to look up words offline/
acqq 12y ago
There are only 180 itregular verbs, the script would be trivial to make (not more than 10 minutes in Perl including testing). Tokenadult lists them all here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738342

ajuc 12y ago

If you like irregular verbs so much learn a Slavic language :)

RyanMcGreal 12y ago

> In between blow-blew and grow-grew sits glow-glowed. What a same. I quite like the sound of "glew". It glew with the light of a thousands suns.

kornakiewicz 12y ago

Try Polish! I would say that every word here is irregular (seven cases and three tenses). Few forms of simple "to be": jestem, byłem, będę, jesteś, byłeś, będziesz, jest, był, była, było, będzie, jesteśmy, byliśmy, będziemy, jesteście, byliście, będziecie, są, byli, były, będą. good luck ;)

felxh 12y ago
Your comment seems irrelevant - the article never claimed that english has the most (or even a lot of) irregular verbs. If you have some linguistic insights regarding irregular verbs in Polish I would be curious to hear them (I really mean it)
- troAway98765 12y ago
  Your comment seems irrelevant - the grandparent never claimed that polish has the most (only many) irregular verbs. If you have some pedantic insights regarding relevant comments on Hacker News I would be curious to hear them (I really mean it)