I couldn’t sleep last night and my fevered brain stumbled across something nice in German verbs:
The consonant combination of "initial l + vowel(s) + b produces a useful set of variations:
Leben, lieben, loben. Then, of course, there is the, I guess, unrelated ‘laben’ and the definitely not related ‘labern’.
Similarly there is ‘legen, liegen, lügen’. Be careful which vowel you use!
I know that Arabic makes a lot of words based on consonants/vowel patterns. I suppose Russian does the same for verbs. Can’t think of any examples at the moment, though.
fallen (to fall), fällen (to cut down), füllen (to fill up) and by cheating a little and extending the vowel sound, I can get: fühlen (which means to feel or to perceive)
My little contribution consists of:
fallen, fällen, füllen (and a little cheat, still 6 letters mind you, fühlen")
Now I can increase my vocabulary by exploring the verbs provided, particularly as I’ve just noticed that I didn’t follow the rule and didn’t use the first person singular but used the infinitive form.
Opps!
Perhaps grammar really does make a difference after all
It took me about 4 minutes to notice that… an excellent exercise.
“fühlen” would just be a long vowel, so it’s not a cheat. The number of letters doesn’t matter.
Dutch:
vallen - vellen - vullen - voelen
English
to fall - to fell (a tree) - to fill - to feel
Yiddish
faln - * - filn - filn (feel and fill are homonyms - except in some dialects… )
)