#131791 - 08/19/04 01:44 PM
What hath English wrought?
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newbie
Registered: 11/12/00
Posts: 33
Loc: Eastern North Carolina, US
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In Sundays Parade Magazine Marylin Vos Savant (the worlds "smartest person") had a bunch of words like "buy, seek, wreak, ... " and asked what they had in common. The answer was their past tense (presumably: bought, sought and wrought) rhymed. I got to thinking about it and looked it up and discovered that the present tense of "wrought" was "work". So far I have asked about a dozen people (including several editors) if they knew what the present tense of the word "wrought" was without looking it up and not a one (including me) got it right. My question is how did "wrought" get to be the past tense of "work"? (In addition to "worked".)
Carl
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#131793 - 08/19/04 08:04 PM
Re: What hath English wrought?
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 12/01/00
Posts: 13666
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This gets a little rough, so y'all might want to fasten your seatbelts and return your seatbacks and trays to the upright position.
In Modern English we classify verbs as regular or irregular. In Old English they were classified as strong or weak. There is a rough correspondence of weak to regular and strong to irregular but this gets a little confused by verbs that have switched teams in the middle of the stream. Nuncle can probably give us some examples off the top of his head but I'll leave them be for now. This correspondence is not one-to-one. Some examples of weak verbs that we would call irregular are seek/sought, think/thought, and work/wrought. This last is one that has become regularized, the past tense usually being worked. The other changes, the vowel changes, the loss of the n in think/thought, and the change of k to gh (the gh eventually becoming completely unpronounced in Standard English), are the result of other linguistic forces. The postion shift of the r in wrought is, as fredbide has explained, metathesis. But it's the final t that lets us know that the verb is weak.
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#131795 - 08/19/04 10:11 PM
Re: What hath English wrought?
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veteran
Registered: 01/06/04
Posts: 1474
Loc: California
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Marylin Vos Savant
And who the heck is she when she gets home at night? Some thing else? Wrought is the past tense, or was, of work. You see related words in shipwright, wheelwright, playwright, etc. Not to be confused with "write".
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#131796 - 08/19/04 11:42 PM
The smartest person in the world
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Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 09/06/00
Posts: 2788
Loc: Seattle, Washington, USA
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#131797 - 08/20/04 05:56 AM
Re: What hath English wrought?
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veteran
Registered: 01/06/04
Posts: 1474
Loc: California
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In Modern English we classify verbs as regular or irregular. In Old English they were classified as strong or weak.
Nicely put, Faldage. The thing about strong and weak verbs (which runs throughout Germanic languages) is that they both started out a regular phonological processes that have been obscured by other changes. Strong verbs like sing change the quality of their vowel to differentiate between forms, e.g., sing ~ sang, but weak verbs like love simply make due with a suffix, love ~ loved (spelled -t in some verbs). This process is related to an earlier one in Proto-Indoeuropean (the hypothetically reconstructed mother language of most of the European and some of the Iranian and Indian languages) called ablaut. And that had to do with the accentuation of words (and perhaps the movement from a tone system (like Lithuanian) to a stress system (like English).
Verbs like bring ~ braught, think, thought, are sometimes called mixed, because they involve a vowel change and a suffix. But their vowel changes are due to other influences.
Dive is a weak verb that recently people have been treating like a strong one: dive ~ dived vs dive ~ dove. Wear and spit also were originally weak verbs, but are now strong. That having been said, almost any new verbs that come into the language are put in the weak category and made pretty regular.
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#131800 - 08/20/04 05:34 PM
Re: What hath English wrought?
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enthusiast
Registered: 10/20/01
Posts: 247
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faldage and jheem added to our basic knowledge of the history of english.. what do you have to offer?I was just funnin', de Troy. Faldage added to my basic knowledge of english, too ... quite true. Sometimes I find myself playing the Fool when the Fool is playing it straight. Only goes to show that playing "the Fool" is a precarious occupation.  We, all of us, like to be enlarged, de Troy, without being belittled. Faldage has provided a good example.
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