The rules

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Morphology — Regular Verbs, Plurals, Comparatives

Fixes §3 Verb conjugation, §4 Noun plurals, §5 Adjectives & adverbs.

This is where World English does most of its reform (design principle 2). Regular English already points the way — most verbs take -ed, most plurals take -s, most adverbs take -ly — so World English does not invent new grammar. It simply deletes the exceptions and applies the existing regular rule to every word. The result diverges from standard English in its forms, but every form is now derivable from a single rule.

Rule M1 — All verbs are regular

Rule. Every verb forms its past tense and past participle by adding -ed, using the ordinary regular spelling sub-rules — stated precisely here so every form, including beed, derives from the rule rather than contradicting it:

• Silent final -e → add just -d (the e is already written): love → loved, give → gived (GIVD).
• Stem ending in a pronounced vowel → add the full -ed: be → beed, go → goed. (see → seed lands the same way under either reading, since its final e is not silent.)
• Consonant + y → -ied: try → tried, carry → carried.
• Stressed final single-vowel + single-consonant → double the consonant: stop → stopped, refer → referred.

There are no irregular verbs and no separate participle form.

The -ing form. The -ing form is unaffected by M1 (it is not a past tense), but its spelling follows the same mechanics stated above, applied consistently: silent final -e drops before -ing (give → giving, not giveing), and O3’s consonant-doubling rule (double a final consonant after a stressed single vowel + single consonant) applies before -ing exactly as it applies before -ed (stop → stopping, refer → referring; travel → traveling, unstressed, no doubling).

Problem it solves. ~200 irregular verbs in everyday use (see §3) — the densest pure-memorization load in English. The three “principal parts” collapse to one.

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. Large and immediately visible — goed, taked, singed are not standard English. This is the deliberate core of the reform: one rule replaces a list of 200. The forms remain transparent (goed is unmistakably the past of go). A translator maps them back to standard forms losslessly.

Rule M2 — One verb of be, regularized

Rule. The eight forms of be collapse toward the regular pattern. World English keeps a single present form be for all persons and a regular past beed:

I be here. She be ready. They beed late. The work beed hard.

(No perfect form appears here — has beed would rebuild the perfect G1 drops; the passive be + -ed is specified separately in G9.)

Problem it solves. be is the most irregular and most frequent word in English (eight forms, see §3). Regularizing it removes the single biggest verb-table a learner faces.

Divergence & trade-off. The most conspicuous divergence in the whole language — I be reads as dialectal English. We accept the jolt because be is so frequent that any irregularity here is paid constantly.

Decision. The full collapse (be / beed) is chosen over the alternative that keeps is/are as a legibility concession, for three reasons: (1) it is the only option with no memorized exception — beed derives from the M1 -ed rule rather than contradicting it (design principle 4); (2) a single invariant be is consistent with M3 — World English abolishes verb agreement everywhere, so keeping is/are would leave be as the language’s only surviving person/number agreement; (3) it is the same tradeoff already accepted for regular verbs (goed, taked), with be simply its most frequent instance, not a separate decision.

Rule M3 — No third-person -s

Rule. The present tense has one form for all persons. Drop the third-person singular -s.

Problem it solves. A lone agreement ending occupying one cell of one tense (see §3), with its own spelling sub-rules (goes, tries) — high cost, near-zero information (the subject already marks person).

Examples. he goes → he go, she tries → she try, it works → it work, he has → he have, she does → she do.

Divergence & trade-off. Removes redundant agreement; no meaning is lost. Diverges from standard English but matches a pattern already present in many English dialects and creoles.

Rule M4 — All plurals are regular

Rule. Every noun forms its plural by adding -s (or -es after a sibilant, by the regular spelling rule). No irregular plurals, no zero plurals, no imported Latin/Greek plurals.

Spelling sub-rules. Three endings need an explicit spelling call, stated here so no noun is left to guesswork:

• Consonant + y → -ies, the same sub-rule used by M1’s verb past tense and M5’s comparatives: city → cities, baby → babies. (A vowel before y is unaffected: day → days.)
• -o nouns take a plain -s, uniformly, with no exceptions for the handful of standard words that insert -es (potato/potatoes, hero/heroes): potato → potatos, hero → heros. This is a deliberate regularization, consistent with World English’s general philosophy of dropping irregular sub-cases rather than preserving them.
• -f/-fe nouns take a plain -s, uniformly, with no voicing shift to -ves: knife → knifes, wife → wifes, leaf → leafs. Also a deliberate regularization, for the same reason.

Problem it solves. Dozens of irregular plurals plus an open-ended tail of borrowed forms (see §4).

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. childs, foots, mans are not standard, but they are unambiguous and instantly understood. One rule replaces a list plus a borrowed-plural tail.

Rule M5 — One comparative rule

Rule. Every adjective and adverb has its comparative and superlative available two ways, both always valid: the regular -er/-est (gooder, goodest) and the periphrastic more/most (more good, most good). Pick whichever reads better — there is no syllable count, no participial test, no boundary to judge, because neither form is ever wrong. Consonant + y takes the ordinary y → i spelling (happy → happier), the same sub-rule M4 uses for plurals (city → cities).

The one hard line is that irregular one-word suppletives stay abolished: better/best → gooder/goodest, worse/worst → badder/baddest — never the suppletive stem. The quantifiers take their periphrastic comparative — many/much → more/most, little/few → less/least — a valid World English form, never the suppletive.

Problem it solves. Suppletive comparatives (good/better/best) and the fuzzy -er/more boundary — the by-feel judgment of which form a given adjective “should” take (see §5). World English removes the boundary entirely: both forms are always available, so the choice is never wrong and never has to be learned.

Examples.

Divergence & trade-off. gooder, beautifuler are non-standard but fully transparent, and always valid. Keeping more/most valid everywhere re-admits the familiar periphrastic form for the cases where the regular ending would read clumsily (more carefully, more beautiful) — but as a free choice, not a rule to apply: neither form is ever wrong, so no one is forced to judge. The one thing dropped is the irregular one-word suppletive (better, worse), which stays abolished.

Rule M6 — One adverb rule

Rule. Form an adverb from an adjective by adding -ly, always. No suppletive adverbs, no zero-derived adverbs — with one stated exception, hard, held back specifically to avoid a meaning clash (see below).

Problem it solves. Irregular adverb formation: good → well, fast → fast, hard → hard (see §5).

Examples. quick → quickly, easy → easily, careful → carefully, good → goodly (= “well”), fast → fastly. hard is the one exception: the regular derivation would give hard → hardly for the manner sense (“in a hard manner”), but hardly already carries the common, everyday meaning “barely” (she hardly finished). Rather than let the two senses collide, World English reassigns hardly to mean only “barely,” directly, as its sole meaning — and keeps the manner sense on the flat, zero-derived form hard (hit hard, work hard), the one deliberate carve-out from the “always -ly” rule.

Divergence & trade-off. Regular and predictable, apart from the single stated exception above: hardly keeps its familiar “barely” sense instead of becoming a second, colliding form for “in a hard manner,” and hard stays zero-derived to carry that manner sense instead.

Summary table