Comments on: Beware of the Irregular Past Participle Forms

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:34:20 +0000

showed [older 'shew']/ shown (though ’showed’ is found)

According to the OED, “shew” is simply an archaic spelling variant of “show”: it’s “shew, shewed, shewn/shewed” (not “show, shew, shown”)

I had a philosophy lecturer at university who always spelled it that way. First time I saw it, I thought it was a mistake; the second or third time, that he was a lousy speller…after a while I looked it up, but it always annoyed me…

By: Precise Edit

Precise Edit — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 23:08:03 +0000

Do K-12 schools still teach grammar? Based on 20K years working with, training, and supervising K-12 teachers, I think that a child’s chance to receive formal, sustained grammar education is about 20%.

Regarding past participles: the main error I see is using the past participle without the auxiliary, e.g., “I seen him,” “I been there,” “We swum at the pool,” “She begun a new project.”

On the other hand, I rarely see this problem with people whose first language is other than English–because they have received formal English grammar instruction.

By: Tony Hearn

Tony Hearn — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:17:40 +0000

it is right to alert users, especially (but not only!) those whose first language is not English, to the ’strong’ verbs in our language.

Beyond that, however, it is worth pointing out that this group of verbs is unstable in English.

In the Bible and Shakespeare we find ‘digged’ and ‘catched’. for instance. Both of these are still alive and well in a number of British dialects, along with ‘teached’. Then you Americans have invented a new one with ‘dive/dove/dived’! And in East Anglia here in England we traditionally say ’snow/snew/snown’ to go with ‘mow/mew/mown’ and ’show/shew/shown’.

Note that the following verbs are mixed weak/strong in Standard English (i.e.they show both -ed/t forms and -en, or at least vowel change plus -d/t):

sow/sowed/sown; showed [older 'shew']/ shown (though ’showed’ is found);
swell/swelled/swollen (my native dialect from East Anglia uses ’swoll/swollen’)
catch/ caught/ caught;
dig/ dug/ dug;
teach/taught/taught;
speed/sped/ sped (though ‘the car speeded up’ is surely more usual? It is in Britain).

By: Cora

Cora — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:07:04 +0000

When I was an English student in the Netherlands, these lists were drilled into us and we were tested regularly.

“swim swam swum”… and all the other 70+ examples of this type of irregular verb.

When I explain this to my children they look at me as if I were an alien. There’s a lot to be said for learning by rote as 30+ years on, I have not forgotten.

As an aside, we also had to learn German prepositions by rote… “aus bei mit nach zeit von zu” etc. Again, I have found this invaluable.

Get the basics right and then you can be creative.