Re: USAGE: Language revival

On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, John Cowan wrote:

> Don Blaheta wrote:
>
> > That's not true at all.  Once learned, we can remember these irregular
> > forms, but we still have to learn them in the first place.
>
> Exactly so.  I was rejecting Ed's claim that we'd rather memorize
> than compute in all cases.  Per contra, we memorize a modest number
> of irregular forms, but we compute the regular ones, just as you say.
I'm not entirely convinced.  I'm not certain that I compute adding a
dental to make the past tense in English -- I think I have just learned a
form of the verb separate from the present tense form and that form
happens to be the present tense form with an appropriate dental added to
it.  After all, the rule for which dental to add is somewhat complicated
to the average joe: I suspect that most people wouldn't be able to tell
you why they add /t/ sometimes and /d/ other times, yet they do, and
flawlessly.  They've memorized the form, not the formula.