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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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A thing which has grease is greasy. A person who lacks sleep is sleepy. A thing which can cause a slip is slippery. These inconsistencies are inescapable in English, but I think I finally satisfied my curiosity about the extra syllable in “slippery.”
SLIP, to creep or glide along, to slink, move out of place, escape; also, to cause to slide, omit, let loose. (E). We have confused the strong (intransitive) and weak (transitive) forms; or rather, we have preserved only the weak verb, with pt. t. slipped, pp. slipped or slipt. The strong verb would have become *slipe, pt. t. *slope, pp. *slippen, long disused; but Gower has him slipeth (used reflexively), riming with wipeth C. A. ii. 347; bk. v. 6530. Gower also has he slipte (wrongly used intransitively), from the weak verb slippen; ... The AS. adj. sliper, slippery, is from the weak grade of the pp.
--Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, WW Skeat
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Carpal Tunnel
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A person who lacks sleep is sleepy.
Someone who is sleepy is someone who has a thin patina of sleep, someone not fully awake. Something which is greasy is something that has a thin layer of grease. What's the problem here?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Drat. I thought this was gonna be a lingerie thread.
But I am very curious about your post:
What does the weak grade of the past participle mean?
TEd
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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You'll have to ask an actual linguist or grammarian. I was just gratified to learn that the odd construction arose from the deviation, although I only vaguely understand the underlying distinctions.
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"Weak grade" is actually just a fancy way of saying "weak".
In English, a weak past participle is one which is created by simply adding something to denote past tense to a verb stem. A good example is "talk", for which the past participle is "talked". There used to be more choice than there is today about what might end it. Sometimes the final consonant is doubled, sometimes not. The use of "t" instead of "ed" or "xed" is the only other ending in use I can think of at the moment, e.g. "spilt milk" rather than "spilled milk".
An example of a strong past participle is "spoke", the past participle of "speak". The form of the word changes, not just the ending, so to speak.
This distinction is virtually meaningless today, except as an arcane subspeciality of grammar. It was much more important in old English.
However, if you are a furrener learning English you would have to learn the weak and strong past participles by rote because there are no reliable rules I can discern which would allow you to determine which is which.
If you've ever listened to a child learning to talk and applying rules to derive words they've never heard or can't remember, you will have had him/her saying things like "speaked", because they understand, in general terms, the rules for deriving weak past participles. The funny thing is, they often seem to "know" that it's wrong, even though they don't know why, or what the correct word to substitute for their made-up PP is.
I went looking for my copy of Fowler to confirm the above, but it's still packed away. Therefore, EO&E.
HTH!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Weak and strong verbs.
Talk about needing a linguist. I've bout given up hope of ever seeing rbarr here (remember rbarr?) but there's always NicholasW (anybody seen *him lately?). Rbarr once back where I first met her did a whole thing on shined vs. shone that explained it so nicely. Problem is some verbs became strong even when they shouldn't have (strive, strove, striven as opposed to strive, strived, strived {you hear both}) others (jive, jove....no wait, jive, jived, jived) grew up weak. What made the one or the other in OE probably predates English and is best left to the professionals to explain. As CapK points out for foreignians learning English it's pretty much a matter of rote learning.
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Re: Drat. I thought this was gonna be a lingerie thread.
it still could be-- or at least clothing..
skirt, and shirt are form the same root word..
and shift too, but i am not sure where slip came in.
or teddy.. and why are long johns called that..
its easy to see panties relations to pants.. but whence pants?
girdle is a pretty old (and old fashioned) but how about corset, or bustier, or merry widow?
another no brainer is thong (as in the anal floss underwear!)-- but why jockie vs boxer.
(and are those americanism?-- okay-- guys, the truth, what is is you have under your kilt, or khakies, or trousers, or cords?)
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Talk about needing a linguist. I've bout given up hope of ever seeing rbarr here (remember rbarr?) but there's always NicholasW (anybody seen *him lately?). Rbarr once back where I first met her did a whole thing on shined vs. shone that explained it so nicely. Problem is some verbs became strong even when they shouldn't have (strive, strove, striven as opposed to strive, strived, strived {you hear both}) others (jive, jove....no wait, jive, jived, jived) grew up weak. What made the one or the other in OE probably predates English and is best left to the professionals to explain. As CapK points out for foreignians learning English it's pretty much a matter of rote learning.
Actually, as you pointed out in your first post, you need a grammarian. A linguist (as such) ain't what you need for things like modern weak and strong verbs. You also need to have a fascination for detail which is really beyond me, to pick up on the differences.
From memory, fallible as it is, the difference was around vowel shifts. And the funny thing is that some verbs which were weak in Old English are now strong. Weak verbs are also, I believe, regarded as regularly formed while strong verbs are regarded as irregular.
The thing I can't understand, and will probably never see a good explanation for, is why some strong AS verbs survived (e.g. grow/grew) while others didn't (e.g. help/healp became help/helped)
Ain't life grand?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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veteran
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Cap Kiwi's remarks are of special interest to me. My oldest granddaughter, just turned 3, has been speaking for some time and is now speaking quite well. I have noticed, however, that while she has learned the past tense, she generally only knows the regular form. So when she wants to make a past out of a strong verb (one with an irregular past, like "write" or "sing") she uses the "-ed" ending. The only irregular past I have heard her use is "saw", so she does know at least one. It will be interesting to see how fast she learns the many other irregular past forms, as well as when she learns the perfect tense. Oddly, she seems to know irregular noun plurals, like "men", "children", etc. This suggests that it's easier to learn irregular forms of nouns than of verbs.
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why some strong AS verbs survived (e.g. grow/grew) while others didn't (e.g. help/healp became help/helped)
Or why some (hang) have both strong (the stockings were hung by the chimney...) and weak (they hanged him at sunrise) forms. For this a grammarian is only going to tell you, "Because I say so, that's why." The linguist will give you the whole thang in four part harmony with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one telling you what each one is about.
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