Re: USAGE: Language revival

Patrick Dunn wrote:
>
> 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.
--
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