One of my regrets when studying Classics was that I didn’t learn very many of the old schoolboy mnemonics that helped successive generations learn Latin and Greek paradigms. The only one I really remember is “Dick’s fat duck’s fur” for the irregular Latin imperatives dic ‘say!’, fac ‘do!’, duc ‘lead!’ and fer ‘carry!’.

It recently struck me that this mnemonic is useful not only for Latin, but for Romanian as well. While there is no reflex of Latin ferre, the remaining verbs still have irregular imperatives two millennia later: zi ‘say!’ instead of the expected *zice, fă ‘do!’ instead of the expected *face and du ‘take’ instead of the expected *duce.