Conjugation
American style
Posted by R. Berg on January
11, 2002 In Reply to: Pause for thought...
irregularity. posted by The Fallen on January 11, 2002
: Elsewhere
on this forum, someone worries that US spoken english is becoming less rich in
vocabulary. Being from the UK and therefore prone to a "holier than thou" attitude
when it comes to the English language, my natural tendency is to agree and view
American english as evolving into a more simplified form - hence the loss of the
diphthongs "ae-" and "oe-" (as in anaesthesia/anesthesia or diarrhoea/diarrhea)
and the dropping of the silent "u" (as in colour/color and many others).
: It
is indeed a given with the evolution of language that things tend to progress
towards regularity as time moves on, with exceptions to generic standards slowly
falling into disuse. However, whereas US english seems to have adopted a more
simplified spelling structure, when it comes to verb declensions, it's the UK
that seems to have moved towards simplification more quickly.
: I'll cite the
two examples that come to mind.
: To get - I get, I got, I have got (UK)
:
I get, I got, I have gotten (US)
: (And yet, "to beget" and "to forget" in UK
English follow the above US route in declension)
: To dive - I dive, I dived,
I have dived (UK)
: - I dive, I dove, I have ????? (US)
: (I can't think
of another example that follows the above US declension)
: It's interesting
to me that the US has preserved irregular (or "strong") verb structures longer
than the UK. It just goes to show how diversified a common language can become,
given only 200 or so years of separation.
In the U.S., "dived" is standard for
past and for past participle. "Dove" is colloquial. "Gotten" now appears without
a cautionary note (i.e., status label) in the American Heritage Dictionary. However,
at the small publisher's where I worked 30 years ago, the house style book said
of "gotten": "We do not recognize this word. Say 'got.'"
If we in the U.S. exported
as much academic writing as we export pop culture, the rest of the world might
have a higher opinion of our mastery of English.
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