Bought Sought Caught Taught

[davejg]

How did we get from “buy” to “bought”, from “Seek” to “Sought”, “Catch” to “Caught” and “Teach” to “Taught”? There’s more, of course (thought, fought, etc.). There must be some old english rule being applied here, anyone here that can explain it?

I know my 6-year old son would much rather say “buyed” and “teached”, if we could all agree to do away with these archaic past-tenses it’d make his life much easier.

[7string]

In a matter of moments

[etv78]

Mini-hijack, but. I was thinking tonight, hopw did we get from “candor” to “candid”?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Steven Pinker’s book Words and Rules has several chapters on irregular past tenses, how they developed, and how children understand them.

There are several classes of irregular verbs and many individual stories of how they came about. buy - bought is of the same class as work - wrought:

How do you get wrought from work or sought from seek? The connection is less mysterious when we realize that the now silent gh used to be pronounced, somewhat like the ch of Bach, loch and Channukah. Start with work (actually wyrcan, but I will use modern spellings to make the changes clearer.) Add the suffix -t to get workt. Soften the k sound to gh, yielding worght – an old phonological trick to avoid the strenuous -kt. A vowel and an adjacent r often switched places in the history of English, because r sounds a lot like a vowel, which makes its order with respect to a vowel hard to hear. This brid became bird, thrid became third, hross became horse, and worght became wroght. We no longer pronounce the gh, and recall that many English vowels were shuffled during the Great Vowel Shift (the vowel ou was once pronounced long o) and that vowels often get shortened when a suffix is added (so long o becomes short o). The result is wrought and the mystery is solved.

The book is a fascinating one, but not really intended for light reading. If you really want to trace irregular verbs, however, it’s hard to beat.

[Futile_Gesture]

Historical in English there was two types of verbs; a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’. The weak used the ‘ed’ ending in past tense whereas strong used modification of the vowel. The tendency is for strong verbs to become weak. So irregular (strong) verbs gradually fade from use and are replaced by the regular (weak).

A good example of this is ‘dove’. It is currently vanishing and often replaced by ‘dived’, although the extent of this varies from region to region. Compare this to ‘drove’, also replaceable by ‘drived’, but not so commonly.

So the answer to the OP is to wait a few hundred years. But we can be sure that other equally irritating irregularities will have arisen in the same time.

[Philster]

I catched this thread, so I thinked I would pop in. At first, I buyed what you teached.