Re: USAGE: Language revival

Patrick Dunn wrote:

> 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.
Reminds me of a letter/essay from Jonathan Swift complaining about
the decadence (sp??) of English in his time. One of his points was
the atrocious tendency to "clip" the past participle forms, as if
to save a syllable, clogging words with consonant clusters.
(I suppose they still pronounced "clogged" as 2 syllables then.)

He also spoke of phonological Drifts of Fashion that threatened
to split English into Dialects, the Usefulness of etymologically
correct Spelling, etc, and the only weird Thing in it for me was
the consistent Capitalization of all common Nouns as in German,
but I discovered this Weirdness to disappear somewhere in the
Course of reading his more famous Work; thus my own Recommendation
to reform our Spelling would be to accept those of Swift ...
and learn to run-on enormous Sentences and Paragraphs.