Why does it write “freaked out” and not “froken out”?
The latter would be more appropriate for my ESL-eye. What do I fail to perceive?
Freaked is past tense. We all freaked out when you wrote “froken,” and then we passed out. Whether we are still freaked while we’re passed is… part of English’s irregularity.
You’re thinking by analogy to “break”, I assume? First of all, “break” has a different sound in it, so one wouldn’t expect them to decline in the same way. Second, “break” is already an irregular verb, so one might just as well expect “freak” to fail to follow it into irregularity, and to continue to follow the normal rule.
I don’t know. Why do you think it should be “froken”? Are you analyzing it with break/broke/broken? or maybe speak/spoke/spoken? Those are more exceptions (being irregular verbs) than the rule. For example, it’s leak/leaked/leaked, peak/peaked/peaked, sneak/sneaked/sneaked (or possibly sneak/snuck/snuck), tweak/tweaked/tweaked, and freak/freaked/freaked.
I actually have some knowledge in this area. English verbs can be divided into two groups (generally) strong and weak.
Strong verbs often date to the Anglo Saxon language, and are conjugated as such. A few examples are break, run, swim, hold, see, and speak, where the past tense of these verbs can be broke, ran, swam, held, saw, and spoke. Conjugations like these are common in strong verbs.
Weak verbs are often verbs that are adopted from other languages, such as expect, excite, or receive, (past tenses expected, excited, received; origins in latin: expectare, excitare, recipere) as well as any verbs which are derived from nouns.
This is the case here, as “freak” is a verb derived from an Old English noun (freca: “a bold man, warrior, hero”) and so the derived verb is weak, and thus conjugated in the past tense by adding an “ed”
Yes, but it is also worth stressing that there are not very many of those “strong” verbs. There are far more “weak” ones, including most of the ones of Germanic origin (and if “freak” is from Old English, it almost certainly did come from a Germanic root before that).
What is more, English has, for a long time, been tending to get more regular in its verb conjugation, with formerly “strong” or irregular verbs being turned into regular ones, that take the -ed ending to indicate past tense (though there may also be few that have gone the othre way). Indeed, although, for instance “swimmed” is not really correct, few native English speakers would be much puzzled by it. If you used it, you would be readily understood, and it only sounds a little bit wrong. On the other hand, if you said “froken” when you meant “freaked” you would not be understood.
Derda, a good rule of thumb is if you are in doubt about the past tense form of an English verb, use the -ed ending. Usually, that will be right, and even if it is not, people will almost certainly still understand you.
One verb that seems to be in transition is “dive”. People commonly use both “dove” and “dived” as the past tense form. I am not sure which is the older form in this case. It seems to me that when I was a kid, “dived” was the form I learned, and I only started hearing “dove” more recently. However, that may be because I moved from England to America, and American English is changing a bit less quickly in this regard.
Wouldn’t the past tense be “froke” as in “he really froke out”? Then you’d use “froken” in some other tense that I don’t know the name of, e.g., “he was really froken out back there”. I wish this was a thing, because “froke” sounds pretty cool.
But agree with the poster who said when in doubt, just use “-ed”. You may end up sounding like a four year old, but you will be understood. I have a kid about that age, and she and all her friends try to apply common sense to English, for some reason.
There’s speak, spoke, spoken. Same sound. Not that I think that’s enough to change how freak is conjugated.
I would argue that a significant portion of original Germanic-derived verbs are strong, and that significant portion of weak verbs are noun-derived verbs, as I stated above, although I should amend that there are natural Germanic weak verbs. Modern English uses many noun-derived verbs, and so many modern Germanic verbs may seem to conjugate as weak verbs.
Most often, (with derived colloquialisms aside, such as “a run” or “a walk”) where ever a verb can also be used as a noun is an example of a noun-derived verb. Such examples include leap, sleep, dream, will, hate, love and talk.
Further, I’d argue that “swimmed” would sound only mildly incorrect to English speakers because the rules surrounding the use of -ed for past tense are vague and used widely enough. When comparing “break” [pr. brake] and “freak” [pr freek], it’s more difficult to see the connection as the focus of the shift is on the vowel sounds which differ in these two words. Similar vowel and consonant combinations often have similar conjugations, such as sink/sank and drink/drank, swim/swam and sit/sat, tell/told and sell/sold.
Errors can sometimes arise when people accidentally use one type of strong conjugation for the wrong type of verb (dis-typed strong or even weak)
And, of course, a discussion on the topic of irregular past/passive tense verbs must by its nature circle around to “hang”, which has a normal past/passive tense of “hung” (he hung around the drugstore or the curtains were hung on the south window), but there is a specific usage in the sense of an execution: the horse thief was hanged from a tree.
I would prefer fruck.
This is confusing. Passive is not a tense, it’s a voice.
So… freaked out evolves to fruck off?
Passive is a conjugation form. Different languages use different structures for the passive. The past(perfect)/passive form of transitive verbs sometimes differs from the standard past tense: “I saw” vs. “I had seen”/“It was seen”. I guess one could call it the past-compound, which can be pretty irregular (run/ran/run, shave/shaved/shave(n/d), set/set/set). The past/passive compound form is usually the same form as the passive participle, in the same way that the active participle is used for the imperfect tenses (“I was seeing”) and gerunds.
That’s not the way it’s done, but now that I see it I like it.
Getting froken out sounds like something that would happen to Froaderick Fronkensteen.
I may have to add Froke and Froken into my vocabulary. Not always, just for my ritzier froke outs.
Yes, that’s the general way my “reasoning” went:: It would sound so cool to be froken out.
However, “fruck” ain’t that bad, too. It reminds me of that other germanic-derived word with F I keep forgetting.
It is a standard developmental stage of language learning. I believe all kids overregularize at about that age, in all languages, or near enough.
I hope you realize they are joking about that.
Then there’s also freeze/froze/frozen…
It would actually feel kind of weird, when you are taken perfectly serious with questions like that.
Hey, this could actually make a good sketch, when someone has the style to pull it.