Is it learned or learnt?
- Yesterday, I _______ to how to make cheese.
- In the past few years, I have _______ so much about people from my many secret experiements.
I didn’t believe learnt was even a word until I just looked it up, but it’s listed as a “chiefly British past and past participle of learn.”
I would say the examples you proved are answered by learned, as learnt seems archaic and informal. If you say either fast enough though, no one will know which you’re using.
I like that - being given permission to speak faster and mumble. yeah!
Is learnt archaic? Does anyone use it?
I thought that about the 3 forms of thrive, but I’ve heard them being used.
thrive throve and thriven.
:my aunt:
Wow these strawberries have really thriven since you moved them last spring.
:me running for the dictionary:
According to Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage:
As a professional copyeditor of grammar textbooks, I can tell you that all the forms like learnt are disappearing from American English, even the more common ones like burnt. Some people still use them, though. You’ll rarely be actually incorrect by avoiding them.
I miss 'em.
[hijack]
Cool job, emilyforce.
[/hijack]
Throve, though perhaps not actually archaic, is probably not as widely used as thrived. I suspect that the trend emilyforce mentioned will continue until we lose most of our irregular verbs. Thus, what was once thrive/throve/thriven will become thrive/thrived/thrived. It’s a little sad, actually. I won’t argue for learnt over learned, but burnt communicates a lively shade of meaning that burned somehow does not, IMO.
I think since English is so widely spoken as a second language it makes sense to make it as un-irregular as possible by just adding ed for the past form and past participle.
Do you think
Will we still keep those irregular forms as adjectives?
e.g., burned toast instead of burnt toast
When writing to an international audience which is better to use in terms of spelling and in this case word choice?
I do too.
Just after i arrived in America three years ago to attend grad school, i handed in a paper to my professor, and she crossed out the two or three instances of “whilst” in my writing, saying that it was archaic. I liked the word, and still like it, even though Bryan Garner says that it “is virtually obsolete in AmE and reeks of pretension in the work of a modern American writer.”
I am probably the only Westerner or at least Utahn to use the word “shan’t”. I like the sound of it… and the look on peoples faces when I do use it.
“Whilst” is such a wonderful word. HOW DARE SHE CROSS IT OUT!
Same for “lest”. There is too much bland Walmartization in the world I plan to keep my vocabulary somewhat creative and eclectic.
Wow! I learnt something new!
I don’t care if it sounds archaic, whilst and shan’t are good words. But then again so are while and shouldn’t. I guess I’ll use every expression when it suits me.
I’m just a little word whore.
Does anyone else make “shit” into an irregular verb?
shit shat shat
learnt is still the most common usage of the word (past participle of ‘learn’) in British English.
learned, pronounced ‘learn-ED’, is most commonly used for when someone is particularly knowledgable about a subject.
i.e. The minister is very learned in medieval history.
shat is also in common usage here (over the pond) too.
i.e. The cat shat on the mat.
I burned my toast doesn’t sound at all right to me at all. Is that standard usage in the US?
Ha I knew shat was a word. Since it’s never in any of the grammar books.
Yep.
[blush]Aw shucks, really, it’s not as glamorous as you’d imagine. [/blush]
Wow! Someone thinks my job is cool!
Wanna do some proofreading for me? Today I’m checking to make sure that any and all mistakes or infelicities contained in the text of the NY State “Learning Standards for English Language Arts” have been reproduced precisely in the state-specific front-matter section of the update of our 10th grade lit textbook.
My mother was English, and I had a lot of English children’s books growing up.
So I was always getting marked wrong on spelling tests in school for putting burnt, spoilt, colour, etc.
My favorite is hanged and hung…hanged just doesnt sound right…but hey that’s just me
oh yeah and dived and dove.
Aren’t burnt toast and burned toast also two different things?
Burnt toast: toasted too long.
Burned toast: incinerated.
Are you serious, emilyforce? You’re checking to make sure that mistakes are reproduced? If so, that’s bureaucracy for ya.
Sure, I’ll proofread. I’m about written out today–I’m a tech writer–but I can manage a bit more reading. 
Not from a prescriptivist (that is, cares about what’s correct) point of view, like my professional one is supposed to be; the two words have identical meanings. But my linguist husband, who is a descriptivist (that is, cares about what people actually say and understand) would be interested in the distinction.
Yep, skeptic_ev, I’m serious. Of course most of what I have to check for is that our editors haven’t edited this stuff according to our house style – we use the series comma, for instance, and follow Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th ed., for compound words, blah blah blah, and they don’t.
It’s not bureaucracy, though – it’s marketing! We can’t sell books to school districts who THINK we’ve made errors, even if we really only just fixed theirs. For the same reason, we never end sentences with prepositions in our books, even though all the grammar experts we hold dear agree that prepositions are just fine there. There are too many English teachers out there who believe otherwise that we avoid it rather than piss them off.
The New York standards are actually pretty clean. God help the Floridians, though, OMG. They actually made a parallelism error in the sentence about the importance of correct parallelism. And included things in the lit appreciation section like “Students must understand Chinese poetry.” The Californian ones aren’t much better.
Sadly, I can’t actually recruit you to proofread for me. It involves comparing one page to another… and the pages are ACTUALLY ON PAPER :eek: and due today. We mark on them with colored pencils and mail them to each other. We’re not exactly a tech-savvy crew around here. I’m in co-charge of teaching our folks how to use Adobe Acrobat to mark up proofs, and you’d think we were asking them to learn C++ programming or something.