Think, thank, thunk

From: "Paul Bennett" <paul-bennett@...>
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 2:15 PM

> On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:31:39 -0500, Benct Philip Jonsson
> <bpj@...>  wrote:
>
>> Eudora does AFAIK not support Unicode.
>> That was why I switched(*) to Thunderbird.
>>
>> (*)I must resist that temptation to inflect
>> _switch_ strong: _switch, swatch, swatch_!
>> Does anyone else play that game?
>
> Oh, very yes.
It's fun, yes. I can't get arrive - arrove - arriven out of
my head. I even found a website called "Gesellschaft zur
Erhaltung Starker Verben" or something on the internet one
day. They've also got a section with lists for English
verbs.

BTW, a friend of my brother when he was in kindergarden
always had _ihr *fährt_ (instead of _ihr fahrt_) for _2pl
go=by=X_ ... and this wrong use got stuck, so my brother
occasionally says _ihr *fährt_ now, too.

As for artificially deriving strong verbs from weak ones, in
German there are many, many strong verbs anyway. A
great-aunt of mine is the only person I know who says
_hängen - hing - *gehongen_ instead of the usual _hängen -
hing - gehangen/gehängt_, i.e. _uffjehongen_ instead of
_uffgehängt_ (aufgehängt). It also seems to depend on the
dialect whether a verb is strong or weak: my father, born
here in Northern Hesse, says _winken - winkte - gewunken_
(to wave, waved, waved), while my mother, born in the very
south of Baden-Württemberg, has "winken - winkte - gewinkt".
According to my 1999 edition of the Duden, _gewunken_ is
dead-wrong. The edition of my mother from 2001 says it's a
regional thing. There's hardly anybody saying _gewinkt_ here
however.

Cheers,
Carsten