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With vowel shortening; replaced OE strong class 7 verb swápan, with the same meaning, but the form is not a regular development from it swell – swelled/swole – swollen/swelled: Strong, class 3: With regularized forms swim – swam/*swum – swum outswim – outswam/*outswum – outswum: Strong, class 3: swing – swang/swung – swung
Differences between the past tense and past participle (as in sing–sang–sung, rise–rose–risen) generally appear in the case of verbs that continue the strong conjugation, or in a few cases weak verbs that have acquired strong-type forms by analogy – as with show (regular past tense showed, strong-type past participle shown).
A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
Strong verbs use a Germanic form of conjugation known as ablaut. They form the past tense by changing their stem vowel. These verbs still exist in modern English; sing, sang, sung is a strong verb, as are swim, swam, swum and break, broke, broken. In modern English, strong verbs are rare, and they are mostly categorised as irregular verbs.
Verbs ending in a consonant plus o also typically add -es: veto → vetoes. Verbs ending in a consonant plus y add -es after changing the y to an i: cry → cries. In terms of pronunciation, the ending is pronounced as / ɪ z / after sibilants (as in lurches), as / s / after voiceless consonants other than sibilants (as in makes), and as / z ...
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present ability: I can swim. The past tense is expressed by I could swim. present permission (in informal speech): You can go now. In the past tense one can use could (When I was a child, according to my parents' rules I could swim once a week). present moderate probability (seldom used): That can be true.
Verbs which in any way deviate from these rules (there are around 200 such verbs in the language) are classed as irregular. A language may have more than one regular conjugation pattern. French verbs, for example, follow different patterns depending on whether their infinitive ends in -er, -ir or -re (complicated slightly by certain rules of ...