Why some words have different present participles that completely alter the original word and have a dual meaning. For example to tell a lie becomes ‘ you are lying’ instead of lieing which is the same as ‘you are lying in bed’

Question

I never understood why some words you drop the y and add ing and some words you don’t

In: 1

Answer 1

Most likely due to spelling rules which say that if a verb ends in a vowel (a, e, i, o, u), you drop the final vowel before adding the “-ing”. The problem here is that with a verb like “lie”, that means you end up with “liing”, which would not have a very clear pronunciation to it (it could be “lee-ing” or just “leeng” or… several different options perhaps). So to solve that, just replace the “i” with a “y” to make the same sound and preserve an easy marker for pronunciation.