12/30/2023 0 Comments Read present and past tense![]() ![]() English has a lot of words, and at some point it's inevitable that some of them will sound the same, just by random chance. Learn how to use past, present and future tenses, along with regular and irregular verbs which cause errors in writing. Each of these time forms is called a tense of the verb. The phrase verb tense is also used for grammatical aspects, which add more details about the duration or time an action takes. As far as why "read" and "red" sound the same, that's a complete coincidence. Each tense refers to action taking place in one of the main divisions of time present time, past time, or future time. Verb tenses are changes or additions to verbs to show when the action took place: in the past, present, or future. So, the best answer I can give is: "it's a known irregularity in English". There just isn't really enough evidence to say. Or this shortening might have happened after the spelling fossilized but before the Great Vowel Shift. Why? Nobody is really sure! One possibility is that the past tense actually had a short vowel /ɛ/, which was written "ea" to keep it separate from the homophone "red". For example, to turn the verb 'walk' into the past tense, add '-ed' and you get 'walked. In this case, it shifted in the present tense, but not in the past tense. How to form the past tense in English: take the present tense of the word and add the suffix '-ed''. Why do we write read for both present and past tense, but we pronounce them differently duplicate Ask Question Asked 4 years, 2 months ago. Most likely, some dialects shifted it while others didn't, and it was basically random which dialectal form became standard and which died out. That's why "near" and "bear" don't rhyme (they used to) and why "tear" and "tear" are pronounced differently (they used to be the same). ![]() But one particular vowel didn't shift in a predictable manner: the long epsilon /ɛː/, written "ea", which shifted to /i/ in some words but not in others, with no rhyme or reason. So we're stuck with old-style spelling for new-style vowels.įor the most part, the correspondence is straightforward ( for native English words that went through this shift): "ou" is IPA /aw/, "i_e" is IPA /aj/, "oa" is IPA /ow/, and so on. Sometime roughly in the vicinity of Shakespeare, English long vowels shifted to new pronunciations-but by an unlucky coincidence, the spelling system had fossilized right before that. So what gives?įirst of all, the reason English vowel spelling is so unpredictable goes back to the Great Vowel Shift. This is honestly a good question! English spelling used to be very consistent, and while it's fossilized now, words from the same source and time period (like read/read) typically have predictable pronunciations. ![]()
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