Re: (In)transitive verbs

Joe scripsit:

> I disagree.  If there is a rule(which applies to multiple verbs), it is
> regular(hence the term).
>
> For instance, there is a rule that says a class III strong verb, which
> has 'i' as the stem vowel, changes that stem vowel to 'a' in the simple
> past, and 'u' in the past participle.  (swim, swam, swum, drink, drank,
> drunk, sing, sang, sung).
I don't think that's so much a rule as a cluster of associations that
represents the decay of a rule that hasn't worked reliably for over a
thousand years.  The strong verbs used to form seven clear-cut classes,
as we can see by looking into a grammar of Gothic, but what's left of them
in English is messy, with all kinds of borderline cases.  Consider "run",
whose p.t. "ran" and p.p. "run" suggest that the present should be "rin",
as indeed it is in Scots.  But "rin" changed to "run" at some point and
produced the current (unique?) u/a/u alternation.

Similarly, Maori verb stems once ended in consonants, and the suffix
-ia marked the passive.  But in the modern language the consonants
have fallen in the active forms, leaving a single regular suffix -tia
(the one applied to all new verbs) and a dozen irregular suffixes which
between them cover most of the verbs in the language.

Closely related effects obtain for the few remaining irregular noun
plurals in English (whether you want to call the Greco-Latin plurals
regular or not is a question), the gender-swapped irregular plurals
in Hebrew, the irregular plurals of Dutch (where both -s and -en
are regular), and the irregular classifiers of Chinese (ge being the
regular one).

--
John Cowan      jcowan@reutershealth.com        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?

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