{"id":185,"date":"2018-02-07T12:18:47","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T12:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=185"},"modified":"2018-02-07T13:18:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-07T13:18:29","slug":"frankensteins-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/02\/07\/frankensteins-cat\/","title":{"rendered":"Frankenstein&#8217;s cat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At some point a couple centuries back, somebody in North America got the idea to take the perfectly serviceable regular past tense form of <em>dive<\/em> &#8212; namely <em>dived<\/em> &#8212; and turn it into the irregular form <em>dove <\/em>(like <em>drove<\/em>).\u00a0 You can plot its course to ultimate victory in this graph derived from Google Books:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/ngrams\/interactive_chart?content=dived+into+the+water%2Cdove+into+the+water&amp;year_start=1800&amp;year_end=2000&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=3&amp;share=&amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdived%20into%20the%20water%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdove%20into%20the%20water%3B%2Cc0\" name=\"ngram_chart\" width=\"900\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>But they didn&#8217;t finish the job, because the past participle is still <em>dived<\/em>: someone who would say\u00a0<em>She dove into the water<\/em>\u00a0would still say\u00a0<em>She hasn&#8217;t dived into the water<\/em>. So something of a Frankenstein&#8217;s monster, grafted together from different parts. I recently stumbled across another such monstrosity. The verb <em>pet<\/em> &#8212; for me at least &#8212; has an irregular past tense like <em>let<\/em> or <em>set<\/em>, where nothing changes:\u00a0<em>Yesterday she pet the cat and let it out<\/em>. But its past participle is a &#8216;regular&#8217; one with &#8211;<em>ed<\/em>: <em>She hasn&#8217;t petted the cat or let it out<\/em>. So both of them are kind of hybrids, with past tense forms transformed into irregular verbs but past participle forms left to be like regular verbs:<\/p>\n<table style=\"width: 32px;\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 85px;\">regular verb<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">hybrid verb<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">irregular verb<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 85px;\">she thrives<br \/>she frets<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">she dives<br \/>she pets<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">she drives<br \/>she lets<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 85px;\">she thrived<br \/>she fretted<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">she dove<br \/>she pet<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">she drove<br \/>she let<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"width: 85px;\">she&nbsp;has&nbsp;thrived<br \/>she has fretted<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">she&nbsp;has&nbsp;dived<br \/>she&nbsp;has&nbsp;petted<\/td>\n<td style=\"width: 10px;\">she&nbsp;has&nbsp;driven<br \/>she has let<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Which is bizarre: why take perfectly good regular verbs and change them into one-off oddities?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At some point a couple centuries back, somebody in North America got the idea to take the perfectly serviceable regular past tense form of dive &#8212; namely dived &#8212; and turn it into the irregular form dove (like drove).\u00a0 You can plot its course to ultimate victory in this graph derived from Google Books: But they didn&#8217;t finish the job, because the past participle is still dived: someone who would say\u00a0She dove into the water\u00a0would still say\u00a0She hasn&#8217;t dived into&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/02\/07\/frankensteins-cat\/\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-morphology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}