2678: Strong Verbs Are Weakening–But Not Uniformly Apr 20, 2024

In English, there are strong verbs, those modified with internal vowel changes (e.g. “swim; swam; swum” or “rise; raise”) while weak verbs derive via an affix (e.g. “start; started”). Far and away, weak verbs are more common in English. Despite the occasional creation of a new strong form like “sneak; snuck”, with ‘snuck’ becoming more popular than ‘sneaked’ by the start of the 2010’s, strong verbs are increasingly weakening. For instance, the past tense of ‘knit’ has traditionally been ‘knit’ (no change), likewise with ‘put’, ‘wed’, and ‘whet’, but all of these aside from the most commonly used, ‘put’, are starting to take the ‘-ed’ suffix past tense. However, when this is taken into context, the waters are muddied, as some uses are changing faster than others.

Take “lawfully wedded [wife]”, which has been more popular than “lawfully wed [wife]”, at least in writing, since about the year 1800. Likewise, the phrase “wed to the idea” has never been in mainstream use, rather the phrase is with “wedded”. Compare that to the phrase “we wed” and “we wedded” where the weak form, ‘wedded’, actually peaked in the late 1820’s and is almost unheard of today, at least in writing. This verb is funny anyway insofar as it is almost never used in the present tense imperfect, and along with ‘whet’ is probably helped for that reason.

Things are different with “knit sweater” compared to “knitted sweater”, where the weak ‘knitted’ is actually now less popular since the late 1960’s, but “I knitted a sweater”, compared to “I knit a sweater” is more popular since the late 1990’s. It should be noted in the last example that it is also highly variable, and the relative popularity of ‘knit’ or ‘knitted’ as a verb switched several times throughout the 20th century.

2515: A Shift in Latin 3rd Person Endings Nov 1, 2021

In Latin, the present tense, 3rd person endings are singular '-t' and plural '-unt'. In Proto-Italic however, these were featured an [i] at the end, i.e. '-ti' and '-unti' respectively, though not always spelt that way specifically. This was probably related to the way that Greek constructed its verbs, though it did eventually drop off. There are inscriptions in Pompeii however that show 'estē' for what would be the Classical Latin 'est'. Indeed, Pompeii is a great source for popular writing as opposed to more formal, high-register, and perhaps most importantly edited writing. This alternate form might have been the source for Romanian's verb endings which look like that today somewhat.

2319: Kobon Verbs: Only 120 Apr 23, 2021

Famously, the language of Kobon only has some 90-120 verbs. This is difficult to imagine from an English perspective with 171,476 verbs according to the Oxford English Dictionary 2nd edition. The way this is pulled off is obviously not having anything like English's many synonyms and obscurely used verbs, for instance having only one verb to express observation through any of the senses or emotion, or another verb to describe movement through virtually any means, though there are 3 words for pouring (regarding solids, liquids, or food) and one verb meaning 'to quarter a cassowary'. What Kobon does have, however, is a fairly normal number of nouns, and to get around certain idea phrases which would be periphrastic in other languages are used. Alternatively, verbal ideas are put together to make a compounded meaning.