Doctor John wrote:
> I'm attempting to add Slovak to my list of badly-spoken languages and a
> thought occurred to me - Are the auxiliary verbs (to be, to have) always
> irregular in all languages or just the Indo-European ones or just the
> ones I've come across?
> Warp, what's the case in Finnish? Hildur, what's the case in Icelandic?
> Anyone here speak any native American tongues?

One cause of irregularity, especially in some of the verbs nearer to the 
heart of the language, is the replacement of one word by another 
(whether from inside the language or without).  One of English's more 
famous irregular verbs ("to go") has for its simple past tense, the past 
tense of an entirely different verb ("to wend").  The verb "to be" seems 
to have suffered this same fate all over the western branch of the 
Germanic language family, which means that it happened early in the 
history of that language group, and appears to have been in progress 
when the different languages became distinguished.

Both German and English appear to have borrowed nouns and verbs heavily 
from other languages, and apparently continued to modify each such 
borrowed word according to its source rules, rather than applying a 
regular paradigm to all of them.

Regards,
John

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