Why do we have a situation where the past of "to blow" is "blew", but of "to glow" is "glowed"? And don't say "flew" if you mean "it flowed". The poem Lovers, by Phoebe Cary has many examples of these.
How did these differences originate? Did "blow" and "glow" come from etymologically distinct backgrounds that have just come to be spelled and pronounced the same way? Is there a general rule for words like these?
Answer
The name for the difference is "strong" versus "weak" verbs. Strong verbs have a vowel change in the past, weak verbs add -ed. (Life gets slightly more complicated: for instance, there are irregular weak verbs, but that's not relevant to this question.)
It basically has to do with how frequently the words are used (or were used in the past). We learn to use these other past forms by hearing them repeated. If we don't hear one enough, the strong past form (the one not formed with -ed) sounds "wrong" to us, and we use the -ed form.
You can see this with young children of the right age, who routinely try to use -ed on strong verbs. When a word is used rarely enough, people grow up without ever getting comfortable using the strong past form, and continue to use -ed. They then pass that on to their children, and so on.
So over time, strong verbs become weak if they're used infrequently. You can see this dynamic in play today with words that are on the edge of the necessary frequency; for instance, what is the past of "dive": "dived" or "dove"? Quite possibly in a generation or two, "dove" will sound archaic and "dived" will be standard.
No comments:
Post a Comment