What is the verb of light?

Answer 1

The English language has a large number of irregular verbs. In the great majority of these, the past participle and/or past tense is not formed according to the usual patterns of English regular verbs. Other parts of the verb, such as the present third person singular -s or -es, and the present participle -ing, can still be formed regularly.

Among the exceptions are the verb to be and certain defective verbs that cannot be conjugated into some tenses.

Most English irregular verbs are native, originating in Old English (an exception being "catch" from Old North French "cachier".) They also tend to be the most commonly used verbs. The ten most commonly used verbs in English are all irregular.

Steven Pinker's book Words and Rules describes how mistakes made by children in learning irregular verbs throw light on the mental processes involved in language acquisition.

Nearly all loan-words from foreign languages are regular, as are verbs that have been recently coined, and all nouns used as verbs have the standard suffixes. Nearly all of the least-commonly used words are also regular, even though some of them may have been irregular in the past.