Saturday, April 22, 2017

Do I so often encounter simple past for past participle (e.g., “I have went,” “what was did to her”) because of where I am or when?

Since moving to small-town northern Minnesota (USA) two dozen years back to teach English, I have noticed a lot of instances in spoken language where the simple past is used in lieu of the past participle, as in the examples listed above. Of course this is only noticeable or an issue for such irregular verbs as have two different forms for simple past and past participle. As a SCUBA diver, I encounter the perfect formation “have dove” with particular frequency.




Since I had no previous experience of living in northern Minnesota before 1990, and not much experience of living anywhere else since (except Greece), I cannot tell whether this usage is more a function of where I am as an observer of spoken English, or when, though I tend to suspect the former.



For those who are curious, my adopted small city was recently used as a fictional location for the TV miniseries spinoff of the Coen brothers’ film Fargo, but as with the film, the dialect in the miniseries is rather a caricature. (The show was not filmed here, and in representing Bemidji as a town with a strip club and without a library it was wrong on both counts.) The local dialect does show at least one notable Germanic influence: upon sighting a pretty infant, locals will exclaim “Oh for cute!”—which for I am pretty sure is more closely cognate with the German intensifying prefix ver- than with the English preposition. Other historically likely other-language influences, besides the Germanic Scandinavian languages, would include Finnish (Finno-Ugric), Ojibwe (Algonquian), and French.



N.B. Ngram is hard to read on this, since hits for “was did” might well be such as “What exactly it was, did not matter in the least,” and similarly for other word sequences.

No comments:

Post a Comment