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This use of English -ing is thus cognate with the -ing suffix of Dutch, West Frisian, and the North Germanic languages, and with German-ung. The -ing of Modern English in its participial (adjectival) use comes from Middle English -inge, -ynge, supplanting the earlier -inde, -ende, -and, from the Old English present participle ending -ende.
English irregular verbs are now a closed group, which means that newly formed verbs are always regular and do not adopt any of the irregular patterns. This list only contains verb forms which are listed in the major dictionaries as being standard usage in modern English. There are also many thousands of archaic, non-standard and dialect variants.
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
Like the -ing suffix, the to-infinitive spread historically from a narrow original use, a prepositional phrase referring to future time. Like the -ing form it spread to all English verbs and to form non-finite clauses. Like the -ing form, it spread by analogy to use with words of similar meaning.
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
Another active word-formation process in English is the creation of acronyms, [243] words formed by pronouncing abbreviations of longer phrases as single words, e.g. NATO, laser, scuba. Word origins Main articles: Foreign-language influences in English and Lists of English words by country or language of origin
Open classes normally contain large numbers of words, while closed classes are much smaller. Typical open classes found in English and many other languages are nouns, verbs (excluding auxiliary verbs, if these are regarded as a separate class), adjectives, adverbs and interjections.
-ism (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)-ist (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a noun)-ity (usually changes adjectives into nouns)-less (usually changes nouns into adjectives)-like (usually changes nouns into adjectives)-logy/-ology (usually class-maintaining, with the word class remaining a ...