From: Rick McCallister
Message: 52195
Date: 2008-02-03
> 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
>
>
>
>