On 2008-02-02 22:28, fournet.arnaud wrote:
> I am not surprised that English-language native speakers make strange
> and innovative apophonic alternations in verbs. It's a genetic
> built-in feature of English that vocalic alternations should be used
> as the easiest and most obvious means to express tenses.
The easiest and most obvious way of forming the preterite in English is
the productive one: the -ed suffix. The number of irregular verbs of any
kind, strong or weak, has been gradually diminishing since OE. For each
ring/rang/rung (originally weak) or strive/strove/striven there have
been dozens of strong verbs migrating in the other direction: we have
baked, helped, glided etc. (all originally strong) not "book, baken",
"halp, holpen" or "glode, glidden". The "built-in feature" has somehow
failed to prevent thrive/throve/thriven from becoming a plain
thrive/thrived verb. Those which have remained irregular are usually
those that are used relatively often, and those very few that have
become irregular since OE represent sporadic analogical formations.
There are also irregularities such as those produced by Verner's Law
which have never been multiplied by analogy. We no longer have anything
like OE ce:osan/ce:as/curon/coren; was/were is the sole survival of the
whole type, still quite well represented in Old and even Middle English.
> Once you grasped this, you can't help tinker with the vowels in the
> verbs, whatever the original verb form was. And I think it's bound to
> go on as long as English is spoken by real native speakers. New verbs
> will be added to the stock of "regular irregular" verbs. dive dove
> dig dug are recent creations. The only question is which is the next
> verb to join in ?
Wink/wank? ....... I'll get me coat.
Piotr