weird past tenses.
The example: glide
What is the past of glide?
Possibilities: glided, glid, glode, glad.
Each of these is supported in some way. A quick look around the internet shows that 'glided' is the most commonly accepted one at the moment, but it used to be 'glode' and 'glad' at different times. 'glid' seems to sound right to many people.
The point of this is not really to find out about this verb in particular, but to look at other weird past forms. Fortunately, English is weird, so if we just think of a couple of syllables that are found in verb endings, such as '-aid' and '-eik', then generate verbs from here and conjugate to the past, we should find some interesting variety:
slide-->slid make-->made
hide-->hid take-->took
ride-->rode shake-->shook
bide-->bided brake-->braked
glide-->glided break-->broke
side-->sided wake-->woke
vie-->vied bake-->baked
confide-->confided fake-->faked
divide-->divided rake-->raked
"This morning, after I wook, I tade a shower and mook breakfast. I rid my bide to work. It tade about half an hour because of the heavy traffic. In the classroom we brook at 10 o'clock, and I drought a cup of coffee. This wook me up and energose me."
Each of the verbs in the paragraph above has been changed in a way that is similar to the other verbs in its group. But think about what you did when you tried to understand what I meant by "wook", "tade" and "mook". A first glance (I glence at the words(?)) at the words alone doesn't help us to understand the intended verb. We then have to try to think what other possibilities the word is similar to: wook, took, snuck (see bottom of page*), cook, f!!k. The position of the word in the sentence tells us it's a verb, so we can instantly eliminate many possibilities. The first letter, w, gives us a strong clue.
But, actually, it would be almost impossible to guess without the context. This highlights that we do not work out irregular past verbs by applying a rule (like the +ed of regular verbs - talk+ed), but instead have a very specific memory of each one.
To show how this works in your brain, I've drawn a little diagram:
You have already selected the word that you want to use, and now you need to find the past tense of it. I've used capital letters to show that this is a variable, so WORD can be the present tense of any verb you are looking for. This is sent to a kind of look-up table containing all of the irregular verbs along with their past tenses. If WORD is found in the list, its corresponding PAST is used. Alternatively, if WORD is not found in the list, we deduce that this must be a regular verb and simply stick "ed" on the end (or just "d", or maybe replace "y" with "ied"). For example, if the word is eat, we send it to the look-up table, find that eat appears, and has the corresponding past tense of "ate", so we use this. If our word is "plonk", however, after searching through the look-up table and finding that it is not there, we just at "ed" to the end to get "plonked".
We can do a little test to see an example of this working in our heads. Make up a new verb and think about what its past form would be:
What is the past of "gibbysnum"?
It feels natural to say "gibbysnummed" (doubling the "m" because the "u" has a short sound). This is because we don't find this verb in our internal look-up table.
So now the question of why, as an English speaker, we feel unsure about whether the past of "glide" is "glided" or "glid". I'm not fully sure about this, but I would guess it feels to have something to do with the similarity in both meaning and pronunciation of "glide" to "slide". The past of "slide" is, without a doubt, "slid". For this reason, it feels as if the past of "glide" should follow suit and be "glid". But remember that our brain is not made of look-up tables; it's made of neurons, and those neurons can be strongly or weakly connected to other neurons. A word we are very sure of will form a very strongly connected network, while one we are not so sure of will form a much more weakly connected network, and a feeling of uncertainty or discomfort when it is used. For me, it doesn't really matter whether I say "glided" or "glid" - both of them feel slightly odd. I suggest that our brain finds a very weak entry for "glide --> glid" in the look-up table, and thus is confused about whether to use this or to disregard it and go with the regular +ed rule.
Another question that stems from this is why we even have irregular verbs (or nouns, adjectives, phrases, etc) at all. It clearly takes more memory to remember a whole set of irregular past forms, and this memory could be put to another use if we just standardised all English verbs to be regular ones. Stephen Pinker talks about this here. What it boils down to is that verbs that are used more often have a habit of evolving particular (irregular) past forms. This makes sense. If you use it often enough, it kind of deserves to be given special treatment!
Some other examples of different kinds of words that behave in the same way are:
**Snuck is one option for the past tense of sneak. Apparently, it is not the correct option. "Sneaked" is officially more correct. However, 'official correctness' is not necessarily the best way to judge what most people use. googlefight.com allows you to compare the number of times two phrases appear on websites, and if you put t"sneaked" vs "snuck" into googlefight.com, "snuck" easily comes out on top. Moreover, I read that it is one of the few verbs that is changing from a regular "-ed" past tense form to an irregular form. In modern English, this change usually happens the other way (from irregular to regular).
Each of the verbs in the paragraph above has been changed in a way that is similar to the other verbs in its group. But think about what you did when you tried to understand what I meant by "wook", "tade" and "mook". A first glance (I glence at the words(?)) at the words alone doesn't help us to understand the intended verb. We then have to try to think what other possibilities the word is similar to: wook, took, snuck (see bottom of page*), cook, f!!k. The position of the word in the sentence tells us it's a verb, so we can instantly eliminate many possibilities. The first letter, w, gives us a strong clue.
But, actually, it would be almost impossible to guess without the context. This highlights that we do not work out irregular past verbs by applying a rule (like the +ed of regular verbs - talk+ed), but instead have a very specific memory of each one.
To show how this works in your brain, I've drawn a little diagram:
We can do a little test to see an example of this working in our heads. Make up a new verb and think about what its past form would be:
What is the past of "gibbysnum"?
It feels natural to say "gibbysnummed" (doubling the "m" because the "u" has a short sound). This is because we don't find this verb in our internal look-up table.
So now the question of why, as an English speaker, we feel unsure about whether the past of "glide" is "glided" or "glid". I'm not fully sure about this, but I would guess it feels to have something to do with the similarity in both meaning and pronunciation of "glide" to "slide". The past of "slide" is, without a doubt, "slid". For this reason, it feels as if the past of "glide" should follow suit and be "glid". But remember that our brain is not made of look-up tables; it's made of neurons, and those neurons can be strongly or weakly connected to other neurons. A word we are very sure of will form a very strongly connected network, while one we are not so sure of will form a much more weakly connected network, and a feeling of uncertainty or discomfort when it is used. For me, it doesn't really matter whether I say "glided" or "glid" - both of them feel slightly odd. I suggest that our brain finds a very weak entry for "glide --> glid" in the look-up table, and thus is confused about whether to use this or to disregard it and go with the regular +ed rule.
Another question that stems from this is why we even have irregular verbs (or nouns, adjectives, phrases, etc) at all. It clearly takes more memory to remember a whole set of irregular past forms, and this memory could be put to another use if we just standardised all English verbs to be regular ones. Stephen Pinker talks about this here. What it boils down to is that verbs that are used more often have a habit of evolving particular (irregular) past forms. This makes sense. If you use it often enough, it kind of deserves to be given special treatment!
Some other examples of different kinds of words that behave in the same way are:
- ordinal numbers - first, second (not onest and twost)
- fractions - half, quarter (which would also be onest and twost)
- plurals - men, women, children (not mans, womans, childs)
- adjectives - better, worse, elder (not gooder, badder, older (though older also exists with a different meaning))
**Snuck is one option for the past tense of sneak. Apparently, it is not the correct option. "Sneaked" is officially more correct. However, 'official correctness' is not necessarily the best way to judge what most people use. googlefight.com allows you to compare the number of times two phrases appear on websites, and if you put t"sneaked" vs "snuck" into googlefight.com, "snuck" easily comes out on top. Moreover, I read that it is one of the few verbs that is changing from a regular "-ed" past tense form to an irregular form. In modern English, this change usually happens the other way (from irregular to regular).
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