Sunday 24 July 2011

A verb that is weak in Icelandic but strong in English

Thank you to Olof for supplying me with a verb that is weak in Icelandic but strong in English.  In English, “write” has the past tenses “wrote” and “written”.  The cognate verb in Icelandic is “rita”.  In Modern Icelandic, “rita” has been displaced by “skrifa”, a loanword from Latin, in many of the instances where we would use “write”, although it still carries this meaning as well as many others, especially in compounds.  Its conjugation is very regular: rita - ritaði - rituðum- ritað.

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