Comments on: Broadcast vs Broadcasted as Past Form

By: AnonyMouse

AnonyMouse — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:02:32 +0000

I think these terms are accepted as proper terms, because too many people started using them.

Maybe they just didn’t pay proper attention at school, and ended up making up their own past tenses like ‘broadcasted’ or “casted”.

And when a lot of people end up using these words, the dictionaries don’t have a choice but to accept them as proper terms.

By: Kartez H

Kartez H — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:18:11 +0000

This is crazy, the English language i mean if you really delve into its nitegrity.
As you can clearly see, this language seemed two be infinite

By: Rod

Rod — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:29:02 +0000

wasn’t it sit/sat/sat?

By: Cat Woods

Cat Woods — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:19:32 +0000

Ewww, that just sounds nasty.

“I casted my net of submissions to the editors on my list. It costed me a ton in postage.”

Makes me think of the preschoolers I teach and not educated writers.

By: Tony Hearn

Tony Hearn — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:08:37 +0000

I can’t argue with your adduced evidence, except to note that in every dictionary example cited the inflected form is given as the second and therefore less common use. Speakers and writers, therefore who are uncertain enough to ask the question would do well to use the uninflected past (without -ed), and would always be ‘correct’.

I would take issue, however, with your calling these uninflected verbs ‘strong’ . Linguistic scholars call ‘strong’ those verbs in the Germanic languages that undergo ‘ablaut’ in the past tense; that is, the stem vowel is changed; ‘sing/sang/sung’, for example. ‘Have/had/had’,and the group with a final -t, such as ‘sit/sit/sit’, and our present examples like ”cost/cost/cost’ are a different case. Here the expected -ed would, because the preceding consonant is voiceless, also be voiceless. In other words, it would be heard as a -t. The result is that it is not heard at all and is not written. This means they are slightly irregular ‘weak’ verbs, not ‘strong ones.

It is, nonetheless, interesting to note the trend towards regularizing these verbs, as you show. This is part of a wider regularizing trend in English, no doubt driven by the large number of speakers who acquire it as a second language and do not therefore have a native speaker’s ‘ear’.