Re: PS Emphatics

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:

>
> Arnuad, vous êtes clairvoyant
> I was just about to ask about the drink, drank drunk
> phenomenon
> and other such vowel alternations
> and why so many irregularities and folk forms
> in non-standard US English we have forms such as
> dive -dove
> fight-fit,
> shit, shat
> bring, brang brung, also broughten
> take, tuck, tooken
> help, holp, holpen
> and many others, although you often have to go pretty
> far up into the mountains to find them
> ==============
> Real languages always are fascinating
> because they are mankind caught in the very act
> of being mankind.
>
> One truly fascinating thing about the English language
> is its stubborn ability to make a "regular irregular" verb
> out of any one-syllable verb.
> So that English is the only Germanic language
> that keeps on **creating** irregular verbs
> out of verbs that just should not be irregular at all.
>
> One conspicuous example is "to strive"
> allegedly "strive strove striven" in grammars.
> This is not an inherited proto-Germanic
> "Stark-Verbum" or whatever.
> The incredible fact is this verb is actually
> a French word "estriver" itself being a Frankish
> loan-word out of a Germanic root itself from PIE !!

That's always puzzled me. How certain is that Paradebeispiel?
DEO says something like
Da stræbe, Sw sträva "strive" (but regular), supposedly loans from MLG
streven "be stiff, stretch intr.; toil" corresponding to Dutch
streven, Germ streben "reach up, stretch or direct oneself; turn in a
certain direction [cf. Da. stræbepille "buttress"]", from Gmc.
*striBa- etc. Now why is it so certain that the English word is from OFr.?

> The English language made a "regular irregular" verb
> out of this Germanic > French > middle-English word.
>
> 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.

Erh, what does 'inbuilt genetic' mean in this context?

> 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.

Not just English.
Sw. sitta, sat, suttit, cf.
Da. sidde, sad, siddet


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