12.8. Irregular English verbs

| Chapter 12: Advanced Actions |

| 12.8. Irregular English verbs

Our three example actions can be recognised in play using the following:

> Understand "photograph [something]" as photographing.

> Understand "blink" as blinking.

> Understand "scrape [something] with [something]" as scraping it with.

The last of these examples shows why Inform does not risk generating this automatically: English is so full of irregular verbs. Inform could have guessed "blink" and "photograph", but might then have opted for "scrap" instead of "scrape".

Inform does risk automatically generating the past participle of an action. (Many past participles are never needed, so the stakes are lower if Inform gets this wrong.) What usually happens is that the "-ing" is replaced with "-ed", thus photographed, blinked, scraped - but Inform has a dictionary of some 460 irregular exceptions, such as caught, fled, crossbred, taken, woven. So with luck Inform will guess correctly. If not, we can get around this like so:

> Squicking is an action with past participle squacked, applying to one thing.

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| Example 3 AM A shake command which agitates soda and makes items thump around in boxes. |
RB

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