"Do you herd sheep?" my Grandma said, My Grandpa leaped in fright. "That Grammer's wrong," he said, "'Have you heard sheep' is right." Of course, that was a simple homophone, showing how spoken English has its own problems. One interesting thing to think about is the mixture of rules that came along with the borrowed languages English is composed from (if "composed" is the right word). For instance, I have a theory about verb tenses. Most are "regular," where the addition of "-ed" creates the past tense. But irregular verbs have their own rules, despite being "irregular." So you end up with ones where vowels change ("give" --> "gave," etc.), and ones with special endings ("spend" --> "spent"). This latter set of verbs is the subject of my theory. Ahem! One of the most irregular of verbs is "go." You get "go" --> "went"? How did that happen? I assume that "went" came from "wend," a different word that means "go." But the past of "went" is "wended," indicating that "go" picked up the past of "wend" and that "wend" picked up the "-ed" of the regular set of verbs. So: Go --> Goed Went --> Went became Go --> Went Wend --> Wended That's an interesting theory, anyway. Eh? Bob
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