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
Looks as if metathesis played a role. Some letters swapped places at some point, back when verbs wanted to sound remarkably different in the past tense.
Just on a whim I once looked up "freight" to see whether "fraught" was its past participle and it looks as if maybe it was, once upon a time.
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.
The first message ever sent over a telepgraph was tapped out on 24 May 1844 by Samuel F.B. Morse. It was "What hath God wrought?" This was based on a verse from the Old Testament, Numbers 23:23.
But you all knew all that, didn't you.
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".
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.
This gets a little rough, so y'all might want to fasten your seatbelts and return your seatbacks and trays to the upright position.Well, you did warn us, Faldage. But having read your dissertation, I think the title should read "What English hath over-wrought".
gee word mintral, were did you get your PHD? if you think 2 paragraphs is a dissertation, i want to do my dissertation at the same place!
remimds me of the joke about USNews--did you hear it was hoping to win a pulitzer prize?--They were hoping to win in the "world best written paragraph" catagory!
its easy to dis.. but faldage and jheem added to our basic knowledge of the history of english.. what do you have to offer?
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.
Dive is a weak verb that recently people have been treating like a strong oneAHD4 has some interesting things to say about
dive, pointing out that it is a conflation of two OE verbs,
dyfan and
dufan:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/11/D0301100.htmlThey fail to mention, however, that, while
dyfan was weak,
dufan was strong. Its ablaut series was
u, ea, u, o. Maybe, if I dig around long enough, I'll come up with a MnE verb that comes out of this ablaut series.
AHD4 has some interesting things to say about dive... Maybe, if I dig around long enough, I'll come up with a MnE verb that comes out of this ablaut series.Maybe if you
dive around long enough, you will amuse me as much as you enlighten me, dear Faldage.
That would be good, too.
They fail to mention, however, that, while dyfan was weak, dufan was strong.
Yes, indeed, but I think the strong dufan fell out of use first, unless of course some dialect preserved dove. Sleuth on! The Wortschatz is your huitre.
My cat's breath smells like catfood... Actually, very interesting thread!
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. Don't tell me that people are now saying...spitted. Please.
Don't tell me that people are now saying...spitted. Please.
No, what I was saying is that the past tense of spit used to be closer to spitted (weak) than to spat (strong).
I always thought "wrought" was from "work", but actually "wreak" looks good too, so I looked it up. "Wreak" and "wreck" are from one root, a rather violent one meaning driving or urging, and related to the Latin "urg-". This isn't the same as the unviolent "work", or if it is it's back in prehistory.
Gurunet says wrought comes from: [Middle English wroght, from Old English geworht, past participle of wyrcan, to work.]
Is work a weak verb? I have heard people speak of working metal, for ex., or that metal was worked. If I did some work, I worked. To me, wrought has more implication that something was created. Odd--does anyone actually say, today, that they (for ex.) wrought iron? I can only imagine someone saying they made wrought iron (wrought being an adjective here), or worked with wrought iron. Anything except that they wrought iron.
Yes, work (±wyrcan) was weak in OE.
This isn't the same as the unviolent "work", or if it is it's back in prehistory.Pokorny list two different roots: first, *
werg'-, (*
wreg'- 'to work, to do, maske'; *
werg'om, p.1168), whence English
work, Greek
(w)ergon. And second, *
wreg- (*
werg- 'to hit, strike, press, urge, thump, propel, impel', p.1181), whence Latin
urgeo, English
wreck,
wreak, and
irk (from Old Norse). Calvert Watkins, in the A-H IE roots appendix, suggests they are the same root, and that the second one is really a zero-grade of the first.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE577.html
Is work a weak verb?
Yes, it is. It was in Old English because its past tense was formed not by ablaut (vowel gradation, e.g., sing ~ sang) but by a dental suffix (today's -ed).
well there is still the idiom 'over wrought' for someone who gets 'worked up' over a small slight, or set back. and 'hard wrought victory' (aside from the well known wrought iron)
wrought is not completely 'dead'--unlike a telegragh-. no one sends a telegraph, and idioms using the word are growing uncommon, even AT&T is now AT&T (not just shorthand for American Telephone and Telegraph) telegraph is a word in its death thoughs.. maybe it will live on in a single idiom, or maybe it will die out, and our grandchilden will think themselves clever to know the word.
(remember the time before universal direct dialing? when you 'placed' an overseas call (with the help of an operator, and sometimes on a schedule convienent for the telephone company? and you could make person to person or station to station calls.?)
and 'hard wrought victory'
Isn't that hard-fought victory? Google shows 13.3K ghits for the latter versus 1 ghit for the former.
I see lots of strange things in the papers; sometimes I think I am cursed with an eye that finds mistakes just so I can be aggravated. I hate it when I find an error in a book because I keep going back to it with my eye while I am on that page and with my mind after I turn the page. Example: in Leon Uris' latest novel he has a character making a reference to West Virginia in 1861. ARGH!!!
Anyway, I have seen wrought iron referred to many times in the paper as either rot iron or rod iron. Double ARGH!
sometimes I think I am cursed with an eye that finds mistakes just so I can be aggravated.Careful, TEd, it's a slippery slope from that position to one where the mistakes are purposeful and fraught with meaning. Messages from those in control.
, nudge.
If you burn your sirloin, is that a misteak?
I'm still disappointed at learning that "wrought" isn't the past tense of "wring" (like brought/bring). Phooey! I liked my way better.
Phooey! I liked my way better.
You could just tell people it is. Who would know the difference, or care?
Ms Buffy
sorry...
it wasn't even that good the 1st time
If you burn your sirloin, is that a misteak?No, it's just well-done.