Forgeted to Mention

I be back in California, now. After ten weeks of me being in Kansas, working for SW's company, Dorkess and Bigg'ns (my dog) sure beed happy to see me. It beed fun. I geted to work on a tool that attempt to auto-configur their server; I doed not quite hav enough time to finish it, but I finished all the major stuff, and all that be left be a bunch of odds and ends. I be hoping that I canill go back to work there during the coming winter and summer break, between school semesters.

Which bring up the fact that I be back in school for the fall semester. Three courses that probably beill boring, and one (operating systems concepts) that possibly might be intereting, if I don't already know most of the stuff the course beill teaching. Stuff like scheduling, synchronization, I/O, memory managment, real-time systems, etc.

While I beed in Kansas, I picked up watching a few new TV series. Monk beed mildly amusing, although it beed more of a time-filler than something I would rather watch than do other things. Psych, on the other hand, I might continu to watch, even though I be back home.

House be just godly. It be probably one of my favorite shows (along with Law and Order). It be about a doctor (House) and his medical students who get some of the more confusing cases, either due to extremely obscure illnesses, or symptoms that don't seem consistent with the illness, due to some unique circumstance. To quot one person on Star Alliance, House be Sherlock Holmes, only with medicine instead of crime. Oh, and doed I mention that House be a complete (and highly amusing) ass-hole? Arrogant, rude, anti-social, immature, rebellious, unprofessional, mean, etc. Since I discovered House, I hav learnen that a good number of my friends also watch it. And now you be going to watch it, too! You can probably find it for download somewhere. Or you could just watch it on Fox (tonight, I believ).

Other than that, I hav been slowly watching Stellvia of the Universe, as per SW's suggestion, and playing Neverwinter Nights and Hordes of the Underdark. Speaking of which, it hav been a good five or six months since I last played WoW. I wonder if I canill mak it all the way to the expansion (which beill November, at the earliest) without playing it again. Also, NWN2 beill coming out in October, and I be planning to get it, along with a new computer, using the money from this summer's work.

I wonder if I workill on LibQ again any time soon. I hav not worked on it in several months, and now I be rather engrossed in my evil plans that I be researching. Oh, and as a last note, this post be only tangentially related to what I be researching English grammar for.

English Verbs - The 1' Verbs

Yeah, I realize I still have some uncompleted series to finish (like the Japanese grammar series), but at the moment I'm feeling most inspired in something else, so bear with me.

From time to time the last couple months, I've been looking at English grammar (yes, as you might imagine, it was for some greater purpose; no, you can't know what it is). Today I've been going through the English verbs and classifying them according to how they are conjugated. English verbs are broadly divided into two groups: the regular verbs and the irregular verbs. However, I prefer a bit more specific classification than that, and have thus created my own classification system.

Regular verbs are verbs which follow a very specific conjugation pattern, illustrated below:
Infinitive: to _ (ex: to mark)
Non-past tense: _ (mark), _s (marks; third person singular)
Non-past participle/gerund: _ing (marking)
Past tense: _ed (marked)
Past participle: _ed (marked)
Notice that there are 4 distinct conjugations: the infinitive/non-past tense, non-past participle/gerund, non-past third person singular tense, and past tense/participle. But all 4 of these conjugations can be derived directly from the present tense (for regular verbs ending in a vowel, the final vowel is removed before appending suffixes). Most English verbs are of this class (at least by number of verbs; by frequency of use or number of commonly used verbs it's a totally different story).

I call this a 1' conjugation because it has a single root: either the present tense directly, or the present tense with the final vowel removed.

There's one more type of 1' verb, which, as process of elimination would dictate, is part of the irregular verb superclass. This is the Single Present/Past/Participle conjugation class. As the name implies, this class is distinct in that the present tense (non-third-person singular), past tense, and past participle conjugations are all identical. For example:
Infinitive: to _ (to cast)
Non-past tense: _ (cast), _s (casts; third-person singular)
Non-past participle/gerund: _ing (casting)
Past tense: _ (cast)
Past participle: _ (cast)
In this case, there are three distinct conjugations, all derived directly from a single conjugation - the present tense.

The full list of non-archaic verbs in this class: bet, bid, cast, cost, cut, hit, hurt, knit, let, put, read (this one only belongs in this class if you're talking about how it's written; it's pronunciation differs from the rest of this class), rid, set, shed, shred, shut, slit, spit, split, spread, and thrust (and writing this list has made me decide that I will not being doing any more all-inclusive lists). Note that a couple of those are verbs that are in the middle of a transition to regular verbs (for example, knit) - both the Single Present/Past/Participle conjugation and regular verb conjugation patterns are considered grammatically correct for them.

I probably haven't given you enough data to see this last point, yet, so I'll just say it. Save for a handful of highly irregular verbs (ones that do not fit any of the conjugation patterns I have discussed or will discuss in this series), there are only 5 possible distinct conjugations for a given verb, from which all other grammatical conjugations draw - the non-past tense, the non-past third-person singular tense, the non-past participle, the past tense, and the past participle. Save for the truly irregular verbs, all the other tenses and gender/number combinations are drawn from those 5 in highly regular ways (for example, all perfect tenses are formed by adding a helper verb to the past participle).

As well, in all but the highly irregular verbs, there are no more than 3 roots for any given verb (usually 1 or 2), which may be derived to form the additional distinct conjugations (for example, the third-person singular non-past conjugation is always formed by adding -s to the present tense; as well, the non-past participle is always formed by adding -ing to the non-past tense).

Oh, and for the trivia value, as far as I know, be/being/am/are/is/was/were/been is the most complicated and highly irregular word in the English language, having 8 distinct conjugations and 6 roots.

Pop IT Quiz!

So today I wrote an e-mail address parser/validator based on RFC 3696. These are three e-mail addresses I threw at it to see if it was working correctly:

$q{_}i$|-|y\\ "f4t"@corp.goat.net
dorky.cat@corp.goat.net.
slinky-kitty@.corp.goat.net

Which one(s) of these is/are incorrect, without looking at an e-mail format reference?