Read read read

An English learning exercise (whose full peculiarity never occurred to me when I was subject to it on a weekly basis back in school) was to repeat the conjucations of irregular verbs. The teacher says the infinitive and the class replies with the past simple and past participle of that verb:

be was been

do did done

eat ate eaten

read read read

sit sat sat

throw threw thrown

and so on, the whole class repeating in one voice. I can’t recall anyone ever being off-beat. And so, along with the conjucation of irregular verbs, we learned a lesson in rhythmics, in chanting a table of words that do not add upp into a meaningful sentence. And maybe it is precisely because the table has no semantic meaning in itself that it at times seemed to mean little more than the tempo of its sounds. In fact, English irregular verbs are still endowed with a special staccato rhythm in my mind.

But what strikes me now is the distance between the visual and the audible ‘read read read.’ There is nothing in the sound of the present tense ‘read’ and the past tense ‘read’ that suggests this identity of spelling. And yet, there it is, making it impossible to read ‘I read’ and know whether I am reading now or whether I have already read the thing being (or having been) read.