porphyry: (Praetorius)
[personal profile] porphyry
From an article in  Scientific American :


Researchers scoured grammatical texts dating back to the days of Old English, cataloguing all the irregular verbs they came across. Among them: the still irregular "sing" / "sang," "go" / "went" as well as the since-regularized "smite" which once was "smote" in Old English but since has become "smited," and "slink," which is now "slinked" but 1,200 years ago was "slunk." They located 177 verbs that were irregular in Old English and 145 that were still irregular in Middle English; today, only 98 of the 177 verbs have not been "regularized.'"


Does anyone say 'smited' or 'slinked'?


This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Profile

porphyry: (Default)
porphyry

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Page generated Jul. 11th, 2025 07:48 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios
December 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 2014