“There are these six other rules (for forming the past tense) that existed 1,200 years ago that died,” he said in a telephone interview. Lieberman believes this rule won an evolutionary battle of the fittest. Most English verbs use the standard -ed ending when forming the past tense. In the following table, we look at the main difference between regular verbs and irregular verbs: base form. Of course, the most famous English verb of all, the verb 'to be', is irregular. We use irregular verbs a lot when speaking, less when writing. The 10 most commonly used verbs in English are the irregular verbs to be, to have, to do, to go, to say, to see, to take and to get, plus the auxiliary verbs can and will. Irregular verbs are an important feature of English. “The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 percent of the language,” said Erez Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard University’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. It’s a linguistic use it or lose it rule. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests that frequent use - in many languages, not just English - gives words their staying power. Irregular verbs are the bane of any effort to learn English, but new research looking at how language evolves suggests frequent use keeps pesky irregular verbs like "take" from evolving into "taked." REUTERS/Catherine Benson For the explanation of the conjugation of the other tenses visit: present tense, past tense, future tense. A generic picture of an English dictionary and a thesaurus. A complete list of all irregular verbs in English.
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