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The vowel-shift irregular verb
This group of irregular verbs have vowel sounds that change in a predictable way, when they go from the present to the past tense.
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How do we know when to use the past perfect?(5 votes)
When there are two separate times in the past, and one is put into reference with the other.
As in: "She had given birth by the time the shepherds arrived." or "The angels had finished singing before the shepherds went to the stable."(3 votes)
Can you use two different tenses if you are talking about one verb with another?
For example, would it be grammatically correct to say:
"Yes please!" said Mia, taking off her jacket.
Said is in the past, while taking is the present tense form of take, but it's saying it happened THEN, so is it ok? Or should I say as she took off her jacket?(4 votes)
It sounds correct to me but I am not a professional.(4 votes)
Is it snuck or sneaked? Because I think snuck is a slang word?(2 votes)- I believe both are acceptable, but one form may be used more than the other word in a certain region. For example, sneaked might be used more than snuck in one place, and snuck might be used more than sneaked in another place.
@ Crystal Smith - This was probably the case in your region (refer above).
However, both are grammatically correct.(1 vote)
- Is there a pattern in the irregular verbs?(3 votes)
- There are various patterns, but no single one that covers all the varied irregularities. Irregular verbs may be irregular in "similar" ways, but not sufficiently so to constitute a "pattern".(2 votes)
it can be used as a vowel sometimes. Y is considered to be a vowel if either the word has no other vowel (for example, the word gym), or if the letter is at the end of a word or syllable (such as the words candy, bicycle, stocky, acrylic, etc.).
Edit: They deleted their question but they were saying y wasn't a vowel(4 votes)
Are there any words besides people's names that don't have vowels in them?(3 votes)
Y can act like a vowel, so I'm not going to use any words with Y in them. There is "crwth" which is an instrument similar to the violin, there is cwtch which is a hiding place there is also cwm, which is a big hollow space in a mountain and there is nth which is a mathematical term (all useful when playing scrabble). There are also words that you might find in a comic book like brr, bzzt, grrr, hm, hmm, mm, mmm, pfft, pht, phpht, psst, sh, shh and even zzz, the last word in my dictionary. I will note that pretty much almost every single one of these words without vowels is trying to be corrected by my spellchecker. I hope this helps!(2 votes)
- Whats the different between past and past perfect? Isn't past just something we done already, if so then isn't that the same as past present?(1 vote)
- I still don't understand what "Past Perfect" is and how to use it.(3 votes)
- The picture you'll find here: http://www.idioms4you.com/downloads/verb-tenses/verb-tense-diagrams.html has been very helpful to me. I hope it's good for you, too.(1 vote)
- What is the difference between past tense and past perfect tense?(2 votes)
- Past tense: "She went to church." (this is very flexible in English, because we don't know if this refers to a one-time event in 1992, or to a habitual practice over several years, like, between 1991 and 2011).
Past perfect tense: "She had gone to church." In this case, the action of going to church happened in the past, and was completed (made perfect) in the past, too.
So, "Between her college graduation in 2014 and the day of her wedding in 2018, she had gone to church one time, for her grandmother's funeral."
That's the difference.(3 votes)
- What does past p.mean?past perfect or past participle?(3 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians! We're talking about vowel
shifting in irregular verbs, which is gonna sound a little weird, but bear with me. To review what a vowel is super quick, a vowel is any sound
that your mouth can make while your tongue isn't
touching your lips or your teeth or the roof of your mouth, basically. In English we render vowels in the following way, a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, or as it is commonly pronounced, aeiouy. That part's not true,
but here is what's true is that you produce vowels from different parts of your mouth. You can produce a vowel in
the front of your mouth, you can produce it in
the center of your mouth, you can produce it all the
way back in your throat. What does this have to
do with irregular verbs? I'm so glad you asked. Let's draw a chart. So I'm gonna put three
things on this chart, the present, the past,
and the past perfect, which is when you're
talking about something in the past that is completed, and we form that in English by combining that verb with have, so have walked, have said, have done. Now in most cases with most regular verbs, the past perfect and the past form are the same, the same thing, but in some very rare cases, and that's why we're talking about these, they're different. Let's begin with the first one. In the present tense, we say "I sing." In the past tense, we
would say "she sang," and in the past perfect, you would say "they have sung." So it's weird, right? Because the vowel changes this vowel sound, ih, ah, uh, actually bounces along your mouth. It goes from front, to middle, to back as you go further and
further back in time, which I think is really cool. Ih, uh, ah. Same thing with the word drink. In the present tense, it's I drink, in the past tense, it's I drank, and in the past perfect, it's I had drunk. There are other verbs that
follow this formula, too, like ring, rang, rung for ringing a bell, but for the rest of this,
we're just gonna talk about verbs where the past and the past perfect are the same, and there's still a vowel shift going on between the present and the past. So if you take a word like win, the present tense is win, the past tense is won, and the past perfect is also won. We had won the game. We won the game. So that vowel shift goes from ih, to uh. The verb to find. So in the present tense it's find and in the past and
past perfect it's found. It goes from i-ee to ow. Sit becomes sat, sneak becomes snuck, and run becomes ran, and run is a weird one because the past perfect form of run is run. He had run, not he had ran. Those are some of the
front to back sound shifts it, at, uh, or it, uh, or ite, ow, that you will encounter
when you're learning irregular verbs in English. You can learn anything, David out.