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April 24, 2006

Conjugating Visits

I am a right/left brained person. Pick the one which means that I like English as I forget which side dominates that preference. I think that's part of the right/left thing anyway...I don't focus. At any rate, I used to love to conjugate verbs. I studied the parts of a sentence and to this day love to use the phrase "dangling participle" in a conversation. I've forgotten exactly what a participle is and why anyone would leave it dangling, but I love the phrase all the same.

I am curious though at some of the past tense verbs that you never hear anymore in articles, books or in speech. For instance, can you conjugate the verb "stink" or "swim"? Wouldn't that be stink, stank, stunk and swim, swam, swum? When was the last time you saw stunk or swum being used?

Anyone have answers? Inquiring minds, mainly mine, want to know!!

1 comment:

CottonSr said...

Blame the Germans. Because of the Angles and Saxon invasion of the Druid-Celt controlled Britain, we have a strong Germanic influence. The Germans do it that way.

It was bad enough learning it in my native language, then had to learn the German.

They do it straight forward, laugh laugh laughed, or weird, run ran ran, but on top of that, make a little girl nueter gender, but a pencil masculine.

We have it better, but got some of it on us.