Things the english language is missing

[highlyeccentric]

More verbs should be strong verbs. Accordingly, Dr Virago has hijacked the paradigm of the verb 'to wing':

...I'd like to declare that "to wing" is now a strong verb. Thus: I am winging it in class today, yesterday I wang it, and by tomorrow I will have wung it.

Just because.

Yes, please.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Will you be my friend?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

sure! who the hell are you?

[iluckywinner.livejournal.com]

me? who the hell are you!

[phrasemuffin.livejournal.com]

Haha! I love it. I wasn't aware that such verbal classes existed as to be categorised by strength, but I do often wonder about past and future verb-forms such as those.

What is it about the verb that defines it as a strong verb? Is it just the lack of the "ed" and the presence of an in-word change?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

It's an old english thing, classing verbs as weak or strong. (and nouns) the titles are arbitrary, but in general there are two broad classes of verb in anglo saxon- weak verbs, which form their past tenses by adding a dental consonant as suffix (d or t), and strong verbs, which form their past tenses by changing the stem vowel. Weak verbs have become the dominant verb paradigm in modern english, but a few 'irregular' verbs still hang onto all or part of the strong verb paradigm.

English nouns have more or less hung onto the old english strong noun class- 'es' for genitive becomes our apostrophe-s of possession; 'as' for plural simply becomes s, and the rest of the cases slink away into the darkness. A few weird nouns still hang around, though, like man/men, mouse/mice, and these are descended from Old English 'athematic' nouns, which change their stem vowel.

there you go. you are now Educated.

[iremos.livejournal.com]

You know, wang in the US means dick.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

i know.

she's an american too.

[(Anonymous)]

yeah, and down here we recognise the Yank meaning of 'wang' and don't go spouting it every which way unless it's someone's name. which is more sensitivity than SOME people show when saying 'fanny'. not that I have a problem with vaginas, but you try explaining to your Belgian mother that in the US the part in the nanny where she's 'out on her fanny' doesn't mean prostitution. :) XX, pix.