The vowel-shift irregular verb | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello grammarians! We're talking about vowel shifting in irregular verbs, which is gonna sound a little weird, but bear with me.

To review what a vowel is super quick, a vowel is any sound that your mouth can make while your tongue isn't touching your lips or your teeth or the roof of your mouth, basically. In English, we render vowels in the following way: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. Or, as it is commonly pronounced, "how that," uh, that part's not true. But here is what's true: you produce vowels from different parts of your mouth. You can produce a vowel in front of your mouth, you can produce it in the center of your mouth, and you can produce it all the way back in your throat.

And what does this have to do with irregular verbs? I'm so glad you asked! Let's draw a chart. So, I'm going to put three things on this chart: the present, the past, and the past perfect, which is when you're talking about something in the past that is completed. We form that in English by combining that verb with "have," so "have walked," "have said," "have done."

Now, in most cases with most regular verbs, the past perfect and the past form are the same; the same thing. But in some very rare cases, and that's why we're talking about these, they're different. Let's begin with the first one: in the present tense, we say "I sing." In the past tense, we would say "she sang," and in the past perfect, you would say "they have sung."

So it's weird, right? Because the vowel changes. This vowel sound actually bounces along your mouth. It goes from front to middle to back as you go further and further back in time, which I think is really cool. Same thing with the word "drink." In the present tense, it's "I drink." In the past tense, it's "I drank," and in the past perfect, it's "I had drunk."

There are other verbs that follow this formula too, like "ring," "ring," "rang," "rung" for ringing a bell. But for the rest of this, we're just going to talk about verbs where the past and the past perfect are the same, and there's still a vowel shift going on between the present and the past.

So, if you take a word like "win," the present tense is "win," the past tense is "won," and the past perfect is also "won." We had won the game; we won the game. So that vowel shift goes from e to uh. The verb "to find," so in the present tense it's "find," and in the past and past perfect, it's "found." It goes from i to ow.

"Sit" becomes "sat." "Sneak" becomes "snuck." And "run" becomes "ran." And "run" is a weird one because the past perfect form of "run" is "run." He had run, not he had ran.

And those are some of the front-to-back sound shifts that you will encounter when you're learning irregular verbs in English. You can learn anything! Dave it out.