tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post8467847980582392204..comments2024-03-11T16:29:13.619-05:00Comments on Lingwë - Musings of a Fish: The secret lives of irregular verbsJason Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05809154870762268253noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post-19322419857731476632010-09-26T11:12:45.044-05:002010-09-26T11:12:45.044-05:00Is it? I haven’t heard that, but of course, it’s c...Is it? I haven’t heard that, but of course, it’s certainly plausible.Jason Fisherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05809154870762268253noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post-76436666855745057602010-09-26T00:02:08.654-05:002010-09-26T00:02:08.654-05:00The "wend" in the "while... wend&qu...The "wend" in the "while... wend" programming example actually is a portmanteau of "while" and "end": the end of a "while" loop.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post-34450013405053689982010-02-19T15:15:15.048-06:002010-02-19T15:15:15.048-06:00Thanks for that! Valuable information, and yet ano...Thanks for that! Valuable information, and yet another example of why I really need to get OED access! *grumble*Jason Fisherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05809154870762268253noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post-53831893202178500962010-02-19T15:02:55.336-06:002010-02-19T15:02:55.336-06:00I should have noted that my lists are drawn from t...I should have noted that my lists are drawn from the <i>Cambridge Grammar of the English Language</i>: I looked at them today and noticed that they aren't marked. Fixed now.<br /><br />Among the verbs, Group 1 is clearly weak; the vowel variations that some subgroups show are not of the ablaut type, but rather represent irregular shortening in ME. Some Group 4 words are the same: the rest represent cases in which an <i>-i-</i> was lost in Proto-West-Germanic except in the present stem, e.g. <i>sell</i> with i-mutation but <i>sold</i> without, and <i>think</i> with i-mutation and <i>thought</i> without.<br /><br />Here's what the OED3 has to say about <i>show</i>:<br /><br />A common WGer. weak verb: OE. sc<i>éawian</i> = OFris. <i>skawia, skowia, schoia, skua</i> (WFris. <i>skoaije, skôgje, skouje</i>), OS. <i>skawon</i> (MLG. <i>schowen</i>), MDu. <i>scauwen, schauwen</i> (mod.Da. <i>schouwen</i>), OHG. <i>scauwôn, scouwôn</i> (MHG. <i>schouwen, schawen</i>, mod.G. <i>schauen</i>): — WGer. *<i>skauwôjan</i>, f. OTeut. <i>*skau</i>- to see, look, whence Goth. <i>skaun-s</i> beautiful (see SHEEN a.); other alleged cognates in Gothic are spurious. In all the continental WGer. langs., as in OE., the verb means ‘to look at’; the sudden change in Eng. (c 1200) from this to the causative sense ‘to cause to see, exhibit, manifest’, is difficult to account for. (The existence of the causative sense in OE. is not really proved by the rare <i>áre gescéawian</i> `to show mercy', <i>griđ scéawian</i> `to grant a safe-conduct', as these uses may be explained as developed from the sense ‘to look out, provide’.) <br /><br />From early ME. the verb has had a strong conjugation (after KNOW v., etc.) by the side of the original weak conjugation; in the pa. tense this survives only in dialects; but for the pa. pple. <i>shown</i> is now the usual form; the older <i>showed</i> is still sometimes used in the perfect tenses active (chiefly with material object), but in the passive it is obs. exc. as a deliberate archaism.<br /><br />The spelling <i>shew</i>, prevalent in the 18th c. and not uncommon in the first half of the 19th c., is now obs. exc. in legal documents. It represents the obsolete pronunciation (indicated by rhymes like <i>view, true</i> down to c 1700) normally descending from the OE. <i>scéaw</i>- with falling diphthong. The present pronunciation, to which the present spelling corresponds, represents an OE. (?dialectal) <i>sceáw</i>- with a rising diphthong.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post-17652398433954612552010-02-18T15:42:09.645-06:002010-02-18T15:42:09.645-06:00Thanks for the comment and links, John. A couple o...Thanks for the comment and links, John. A couple of further remarks. On the nouns: (1) In your first group of irregular nous, a number of these have been normalizing recently, e.g., <i>hooves</i> or <i>hoofs</i>, <i>rooves</i> or <i>roofs</i> (not on your list). (2) Your fourth group demonstrates an entire category of words irregular because of borrowing, a whole class I left out of my post, but worth remembering. This happens in other languages, too — e.g., Italian <i>il jazz</i>, <i>il computer</i>, <i>il jeans</i>, with plural forms the same as the singular, and all irregular. (3) You third group of nouns had <i>ox/oxen</i>, about which I have written <a href="http://lingwe.blogspot.com/2009/02/oxen-and-foxes-curious-life-and-death.html" rel="nofollow">previously</a>.<br /><br />On the verbs: (1) “Only about half the English irregular verb roots are strong (ablaut) verbs: the rest are weak verbs with -t instead of -ed, with internal loss, or other peculiarities.” Are they weak? Most of them show systematic internal vowel changes. (2) Regarding <i>shew</i>, very interesting. I will have to look into that a bit more. At a glance, then, it looks like <i>shew, show(ing)</i> might be analogous to <i>sew, sewing</i>?Jason Fisherhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05809154870762268253noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9050528436539921312.post-397653724351909282010-02-18T14:39:39.144-06:002010-02-18T14:39:39.144-06:00I think it's the verbs that tend to be irregul...I think it's the verbs that tend to be irregular for the simple reason that most commonly learned languages have far more noun roots than verb roots, and therefore individual verbs are more frequent in running text than individual nouns. Since it's only the high-frequency irregulars that can avoid being leveled, we end up with lots of irregular verbs and only a few irregular nouns. Leaving out the Latin and Greek plurals, there are only about 40 <a href="http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc46qrdf_27c8mz6nf5" rel="nofollow">irregular noun roots</a> in English, compared to about 135 <a href="http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc46qrdf_26rx2sxnnn" rel="nofollow">irregular verb roots</a> (I count roots because some verbs have many more prefixes than others).<br /><br />A few points:<br /><br />Only about half the English irregular verb roots are strong (ablaut) verbs: the rest are weak verbs with -t instead of -ed, with internal loss, or other peculiarities.<br /><br /><i>Show</i> in fact began as a weak verb and acquired strong forms only later, a rare "wrong-way conversion": it now has the hybrid conjugation <i>show, showed, shown</i>, with occasional uses of <i>showed</i> as past participle. The 1915 use (Shaw, I presume) is the separate verb <i>shew</i>, the direct descendant of OE <i>scéawan</i>, which is now almost obsolete and has been pronounced the same as <i>show</i> for centuries. <i>Show</i> is from a variety of OE or EME that changed the falling diphthong into a rising one, <i>sceáwan</i>.<br /><br />WEND is of course a portmanteau form of "while+end".John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.com