muckefuck | Getting stronger all the time

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Getting stronger all the time

Here's a question for you English etymology mavens: How many verbs can you name which were not strong in Old English but are in the modern language?

I'll take dive off the list since (a) dove is considered by many to be an Americanism and (b) it's the only one I knew about before I started researching the question. That still leaves three more indisputable cases I've unearthed plus one that's more arguable. Do you know what they are?

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Actually, dive could be strong in OE. There were two verbs, dūfan (strong intransitive) and dȳfan (weak transitive), so you could say for instance ic deaf under yþe ‘I dove under the waves’.

But that is just to draw attention from the fact that I don't really know the answer to the question..

I'm thinking of sneak –> snuck, but I don't think that even existed in OE.

Yes, but (1) deaf was obsolete by the 14th century and (2) it couldn't possibly be the ancestor of dove anyway; the vocalism doesn't work out.

Sneak is another arguable case, although not the one I had in mind. There was an OE snican but the forms don't agree and the modern verb is strong from the first attestation. It's most likely a strong verb gone weak.

Ooh! Wear and wore? Right? Teaching second graders has actually made me learn more about grammar and rules than I ever knew before.

I think I know another one as well, but I will leave it for someone else to get. I will say that the one I know starts with an s blend.

OED sez:

The change from the weak to the strong conjugation, due to the analogy of verbs like swear, bear, tear, seems to have begun in the 14th c., but is rare before the 16th.

Give yourself a cookie! This isn't even one of the ones I thinking of!

Mmmm... hazelnut! Delicious.

How about dig/dug?

It is properly a weak verb, pa. tense and pple. digged, but in 16th c. received a strong pa. pple. dug, analogous to stuck, which since 18th c. has also been used as pa. tense.

Damn you're good at this!

I remember discussing this once back at Georgetown, but I have forgotten most of it.

Two questions-- what about wake/woke? That one always bothers me. The end of To Kill a Mockingbird sounds so wrong, and yet, in a way, it's also right.

The other one is drink/drank. I know that it should be drink/drunk, but because drunk tends to be an adjective, drank seems to have taken over as the pp. That one might be interesting, because while it was already strong, it changed forms to another irregular, you know?

The obvious one is spit/spat, though.

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