Fun Language Fact

Fun Language Fact

As English speakers know, there are a lot of verbs that have irregular past tenses -- write/wrote, sit/sat, etc.

The idea of keeping the same consonants and changing the vowels to make different forms of the same word goes all the way back to ancient Sanskrit, if not further.

English, as one of the Indo-European languages, is distantly related to Sanskrit.

So that's where we get this rule of changing the vowel of a a root to change the function of the word.

Even more fun fact: the words "sit" and "sat" are clear examples of this change in vowels to change the function of the word, in this case from present to past tense.

But there also used to be the possibility to remove the vowel completely to change the function of the word. In the case of "sit, we would get simply "st."

And the word "nest" meant, originally, "the place where a bird sits." Nest, sit, and sat, are distantly related to each other.

I share this partly because so many people, myself included, think that English grammar and spelling are just insane.

But in reality, many of the so-called irregularities can be traced back to earlier ancestor languages that eventually led to English.