Sometimes there will be choices in language and I will wonder (for example) "What's the difference between hanged and hung*? Is one more proper than the other? Is one British? Is one becoming archaic? Is one considered slang?" When I look it up, I often find that both forms are correct in some context, but that the ground is changing, and one looks like it is going to win out in a century or so.
We are living through a language change in general of the -t ending versus the -ed ending of some words, and -ed is slowly winning. Yet not always. Spoilt and smelt are just about gone in favor of spoiled and smelled. The two forms dreamt and and dwelt have an air of the poetic about them and are thus preferred in some instances to dreamed and dwelled. That is often a clue, if only poets or other people trying to capture a formal or romantic flavor are using the form. (That is why the Authorised [KJV] Version of the Bible went out of date so quickly. The translators intentionally chose the poetic, traditional, and formal language - just as it was going out of general use. The -eth ending was just about gone in favor of the -es ending coming down from the north. But it just sounded better to them, more holy, making it a bit harder for us to read today.) But there is no sleeped, so slept will endure a while. Maybe it will remain as an isolate, or maybe speakers will push it out because it doesn't "obey the rule," as if language change has any rules. It will be aided by forms which have hung on despite competition because they are parts of common phrases: spilt milk and burnt toast, even though spilled and burned exist. Notice that those are adjectives, not verbs, which often keep unusual forms longer.
It is not merely that people born in 1940 use a word 80% of the time, those of 1950 70% and so forth. While we are alive we also hear, and slowly modify our choices. Not as quickly as those younger, but we are alive and hearing things in the air which influence us, and even we come to consider one usage to be "a bit too formal for this instance," or "eh, that has a old-fashioned feel that I usually like but not here."
This is how language change occurred in the past as well. "That's a viking word you ungrateful whelp, and I won't have it spoken in my house. We speak good English here!" But in the next valley they just shrugged and gradually adopted the word. Because of trade, they could only get so far apart. As salesmen will consciously or unconsciously mimic the speech of those they are trying to sell to today, so too did the ironmongers and fishermen then. It sold fish. Which was the point.
*A person is hanged, everything else is hung. It persists largely because the wording exists in the law so often that lawyers and courts keep using it. Otherwise it would probably only stick around as slang.
6 comments:
You missed up-talking. About a generation ago, young people began ending spoken declarative sentences with a rising tone, as if they were questions. This has now become more or less the standard for spoken English. As a geezer, I find it irritating.
While I appreciate the original KJV, I prefer the NKJV or, better, the Revised Standard Version. That translation has the great advantage of being approved by both Catholics and Protestants.
My favorite, however, the The Orthodox Study Bible for the footnotes. If you are Catholic, you might want to avoid the Introduction, which is an anti-Catholic diatribe.
And "hung" is SEXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIST, speaking of men....
'Builded' is another 'sleeped' where the -t might hang on for awhile.
At Project Gutenberg we using a markup that's like "sic" for likely typos, but preferably not for the archaic usage that's rampant in these out-of-copyright books. Newbies betray themselves by questioning all the archaic words and spelling. Presumably they haven't spent much time reading old books.
When I was a kid my elder sister objected to "loth" as a Scrabble entry (as in "reluctant"), insisting it was "loath." I was pretty little, but I was SURE I'd seen it spelled "loth." I was reminded of this recently when I ran across a spate of Gutenberg books with "loth." I probably had been seeing it in the old-fashioned fairy tales I liked to read way back then. My sister's gone these 25 years, so I can't say "See! I told you!" She was correct, of course, that the more modern spelling is "loath." In fact, the word has fallen out of usage in any form, though we still use the verb "loathe."
The Gutenberg juvenilia often make a point of putting quotation marks around words the author considers schoolboy slang, but which strike me as perfectly ordinary, like "gym," which may even appear as gym'. Today we've nearly forgotten that it's short for gymnasium, or that a gymnasium originally did not refer to a building for school sports.
Some words hang on in songs.
@ Christopher B - "He hath builded him an altar..."
Yeah, we haven't said that for a long time.
@ Texan99 - I still use "loth" as an ironic archaism, having told my sons on occasion "I am loth to give you permission to do this."
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