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

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?

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?

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.

"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!

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.

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?)

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?

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.

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.

while she has learned the past tense, she generally only knows the regular form.

The normal pattern among children learning language for the first time is to learn words in isolation and only later pick up the rules. Perhaps, because you may not have as much exposure to your granddaughter as you did to your children, you missed the stage where she was using irregular (strong) forms of verbs, only noticing when she learned the rule for weak verbs and began applying it to all verbs. Some children even use the strong form of a verb but apply the weak past tense marker anyway, e.g., "I sawed a man." She doesn't mean she tried a gender bender version of the magician's trick.

The important thing for you to remember, this isn't a step backward; this is a step forward.

[possibly boring to most] Bob, what you noticed with your grandchild is the norm, or at least that's what I picked up from studies I read while I was fiddling around with computational linguistics way back when I was naive enough to think that teaching a computer to talk could be done independently of teaching a computer to think ... still, a dissertation completed and accepted is a dissertation finished.

I no longer have the papers I read - they got dumped several house moves ago - and so I can't quote, but nearly all children seem to learn language in much the same way, the detail of their approach depending on the language being learned.

At the same time as I was scrivening my way towards my post-grad diploma, my niece was rising two and a half years old and talking fit to bust. She was quite bright and learned new vocab at an impressive rate. But she had a grammatical/linguistic quirk which I found fascinating. She would say:

"I talk" for the present
"I talked" for the imperfect past, and
"I have talkted" for the perfect past.

The "talkted", as far as I could make out, was an attempt to add an extra "ed" to "talked", creating "talkeded", so to speak, the beginner's approach to parsing perfect past participles. It seemed to show that she had absorbed the idea that the perfect tense sometimes took a different form of the verb than the imperfect, and it was better to be "safe" than sorry.

Examples of this of course are fairly common, but for example:

"I grow"
"I grew"
"I have grown"

Why she, or any child, would be struck by this relatively small difference in verb formation to the extent that she would form a word-formation rule based on it, I have no idea.

And the rule of thumb she used kind of stuck, because I would correct her when she did it to one particular verb, e.g. "talked", but she would merrily continue to apply it to the next verb along.

At the time, I put it down to her being just her, but I've heard similar constructs out of the mouths of other near-babes and ex-sucklings since, so the papers I was reading would appear to be empirically corroborated even if it is based on a rather small sample.

Didn't help with the computational linguistics in the slightest, unfortunately ...

FWIW

The difference between weak and strong verbs in English appears to date back to proto-Germanic, where the -d- inflexion arose. It does not appear to be related to weak inflexions in other Indo-European languages: e.g. Greek had a perfect using -k-, and Latin used -v-.

Proto-Indo-European probably didn't have a weak inflexion at all. I've got to admit this is more complicated than I understand and I would need to study several of my geet big thick books some more to get a handle on it. But basically, the sing-sang-sung kind of pattern was regular at the proto-Indo-European level.

It is theorized to derive from pre-Indo-European accent patterns, changing the vowels. I really should know more of this.

P.S. Hi.

Hi, Sweet Nicholas! Thank you for the lovely post.

For a brilliant (IMHO) discussion on weak and strong verbs, see if you can find the book "Words and Rules" by Stephen Pinker.

Someone who is sleepy is someone who has a thin patina of sleep, someone not fully awake.

How interesting that you use sleepy primarily in that sense, Faldage. I always use it in the "needing sleep" sense. If I'm jolted (partly) awake and still semi-comotose, I am "groggy" or "half-asleep."

Well, if the strong/weak issue is more complicated than NicW comprehends, I feel much better about my own feeble understanding.

Thanks for all the explications, guys.

sleepy -- needing sleep

If I've been awake for thirty hours straight and I'm all hyped up on caffeine and sugar or whatever, I wouldn't describe myself as sleepy. Yinged out, maybe, but not sleepy. To me sleepy is characterized by yawning, heavy eyelids and difficulty staying awake.

all hyped up on caffeine and sugar or whatever

I'd call that wired.

But not sleepy!

...on caffeine and sugar or whatever, I wouldn't describe myself as sleepy. Yinged out, maybe...

Are there two forms (or possibly languages) of this word which "denote" the same state - the opposite of Yang. I know it as Yin. Therefore, I'd suppose the phrase would be Yinned out(sp?).(not that I would ever verbify a noun)

I'm much more intrigued by this use of 'patina':

Someone who is sleepy is someone who has a thin patina of sleep, someone not fully awake.

I'd suppose the phrase would be Yinned out

Yeeahbut© it just doesn't have the right edge to it.

I see!(said the blind man to his deaf dog on a sunny night) It isso far Yin that the circumference has almost been *circumfed{sir-cumft}.

Or is that 'almost has'?

patinar v. Sp. to skate
patino
patinas
patina
patinen
patinamos

To skate along the edge of sleep
and spin off into dreams.

Great thread!...I found all the verb discussion of particular interest...thanks, everyone. My pet verb peeve right now is the saw/seen dilemma. We've discussed the natural evolution of language, and I agree there's no biblical scripture to prevent it from forming new nuance and patterns. But we always knew, we were always taught that I, we, or they seen it, was incorrect. And I still can't get used to it, and probably never will. The problem is that it's becoming so prevalent in usage it's beginning to sound correct, so much so that even educated people are now chiming in with it. No one corrects it...it's become acceptable now in most quarters, evidently. And, I hear it so often around me anymore, that once in a while (horror of horrors! ) I even catch myself slipping out with it when I know better! And each time I want to kick myself. But it seems the process has become its own creature, and now there's no turning back. I seen the light! I seen saw go away......

The 've is understood.

The 've is understood.

No. Because seen in this context is usually used in an inappropriate tense, where saw would be grammatically applicable, using the past participle form instead of the past. If it was simply a matter of dropping the supporting/qualifying have or -'ve within the proper tense it wouldn't be as much an aberration. Using seen instead of saw in this context is akin to saying I eaten that, which, of course, requires the supporting have, instead of I ate that. But, as you point out Faldage, the fact that folks have taken to lazily dropping the qualifier in the past participle form of seen has helped it to sound "right" through repetition, and thus to wash over into usage in the improper tense as well.

I('ve) seen that.

I('ve) eaten that.

In the first example the ('ve) is assimilated into the sibilant of seen. In the latter the ('ve) is between two vowels and has nothing to be assimilated into.

I drunk, I blown, I drawn, I flown, I grown, I known, I sworn, I torn, I worn, I chosen, I driven, I fallen, I forgiven, I gotten, I given, I ridden, I risen, I shaken, I shrunken, I spoken, I stolen, I taken, I written

All these past participles require have or -'ve. Notice they all begin with consonants? Sibilant schmibilant.

Where I live, the " 've" is not "understood" or assimilated: it isn't there in any form. I would bet money that the majority of people here who say, "I seen that movie" [gritted teeth e] have no idea that what they're saying is incorrect English. And for the minority that DO know it's incorrect, most of them don't care.

I cannot, of course, say with certainty that there've been no times when a speaker has elided the 've into the next word and I didn't hear it, but I will say that there have been many times when the 've IS audible.

All these past participles require have or -'ve

A) I was a little too fine tuned when I specified sibilant. Most if not all consonants will do the trick. This was common in Latin; nobody rails against such "errors" as Republic for res publica or irregular for inregular. It is also a feature of Arabic, the article al becomes as before words starting with s, am before words starting with m etc.

2) I'm speaking of the historical development of this process. This isn't something that happened overnight or even in one generation. The 've slowly got softer and softer till the youngsters learning the language didn't hear it at all so they didn't incorporate it into the grammar they developed from listening to their elders.

how do you choose when to let your pedantry loose, and which hairs to split?

I only fight for or against usages when I know I'm right.

Seriously, this one started out as a tweak of the noses of prescriptivists who will invoke understood in one context and totally ignore it in others.

All seriousness aside, I *do believe that we reinvent grammar every generation. I also believe that some people are less capable than others of relearning, in a formal setting, the speech patterns they developed when learning the language on their own.

I('ve) eaten that.

I('ve) eaten that.

Seeking the rules for linguistic evolution won't help here. The deterioration goes far beyond that - if anything one hears "I et"...

what moves you to "tweak the nose of" prescriptivism in some posts, and defend it ... in others?

Hey, I just like arguing about inconsequential matters.

Hey, I just like arguing about inconsequential matters.
Hey, I believe you.
Hey, I'll remind you.

While I agree with Faldage that "I seen" is not exactly an uncommon usage, I do not agree with his take on the development of that usage. "I seen" has been around in America for a long time - I remember reading it in quotes written in the 19thC. "I seen" and "I been" seem to have more origins in African-American and poor Southern speech patterns than anything else I can think of. At least, that's where you see them used the most. You very, very rarely hear it, even from kids, in Zild. It is, however, part of the verbal shorthand used by some brogues here in England.

I don't think that anyone believes that it is a "valid" grammatical usage, however. Like everything else in English, it seems to be negotiable. The interesting thing is, always, that even when we make the most diabolical blunders in the use of the language, we seem to be able to understand each other on the surface. Someone saying "I seen that movie" may make me grit my teeth, but I understand what it is that the ignorant sod is saying.

And when it comes from socio-economic or ethnical/cultural groups where it is an accepted redefinition of English, it doesn't even seem that offensive.

None of this applies to you lot, my friends!

even when we make the most diabolical blunders in the use of the language, we seem to be able to understand each other on the surface.

Which pretty much limns my take on opposing or defending linguistic change. There is no confusion about meaning when someone says, "I seen that movie arready." If someone (mis)uses, e.g., the word virulent, on the other hand, there can be much confusion (Wah, Cuhnel Beauregawd, you are just so strong and virulent!). But we learn to live with it and, if a distinction in meaning is required we will develop other means to express it.

"I seen" and "I been" seem to have more origins in African-American and poor Southern speech patterns

And it is exactly these people who will have the least opportunity to relearn formally the grammar they develop informally.

> I am....."half-asleep."

As opposed to "half-awake"???????

stales