Peculiar Pasts

[tamaranth]

I've enquired elsewhere about this issue, but the answers are so wildly disparate that I'm beginning to think the question is more complex than it seems!

'Dreamed' and 'dreamt' are both valid past & past participle forms of the verb 'to dream' (according to Fowler and the OED, anyway). The '-t' form, however, seems to be much less widely accepted, and I'm told that it's more or less obsolete in American English.

Also applies to smelled/smelt, burned/burnt, learned/learnt ...

Question: Can anyone explain the difference between the '-ed' and '-t' forms?

Comments

[jhaelan.livejournal.com]

Also: sneaked and snuck, if you don't mind me hijaking your LiveJournal ;)

[mindygoth.livejournal.com]

Can't really explain the difference, but in the case of burned and burnt, I tend to see one as being an action that happened in the past - "I burned the sausage", and one as being a description of something's state - "The sausage is burnt" which can be a present tense thing, whereas burned is always past tense.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Interestingly I always use them the other way around: "I burnt the sausage", "the sausage has been burned"...

Generally I find the "-t" works for me as first person, and "-ed" as third...

[mindygoth.livejournal.com]

That's not the other way around, those are both past tense. :-) But I think I agree on the 1st / 3rd person preference. The more I think about it, the more my head hurts :-)

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

burnt would be a past participle used as an adverb; the burnt toast would be the same used adjectivally. neither of them are a verb as such, whereas he burned the toast is all verb.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in Steven Pinker's book "Words and Rules", which is all about the various parts of irregular verbs and what they tell us about language acquisition, history, the mind, society...

Not, you understand, that this will answer your question; but it's interesting. "Snuck", incidentally, is the most recently coined irregular verb form in English.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I think you'll find "coint" is more recent.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Oh, ho, ho. I meant 'in common usage', of course.

[damienw]

Huh; snuck is interesting, being a strong verb form. Gosh.

[damienw]

All I know is that if a verb adds a dental suffix then it's a weak verb, and that at least in OE there are two kinds of weak verb (-ede and -ed/t). So this would seem to be some fossil language. But all of my language books are somewhere else, tho' I would second the suggestion to read Pinker. Hmm. I wonder if anything's lying around here...

[drplokta]

Most likely, "dream" is in transition between irregularity and regularity. I would expect that 200 years ago "dreamt" was nearly universal, and (although it's harder to verify) that in two hundred years time "dreamed" will dominate.

But, as everyone else said, read the Pinker. Best titbit from it: only 2% of German nouns have regular plurals. Indeed, there are irregular methods of plural formation that are much commoner than the regular one.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

*ponders*
*ponders more*

No. Cant think of a difference. I tend to personally prefer the 't' form however, they sound different and can be used to construct more appropriate sentences.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Just running "dreamed" and "dreamt" past my internal editor (inside my brain) and it suggests "perfect" for the first and "pluperfect" for the second.

It says it gets a feeling that "dreamed" is something in the past but in the middle past, while "dreamt" is in the distant and inaccessible past ...

... in Latin class we were told the past tenses were

imperfect - I was dreaming
perfect - I have been dreaming (?I dreamed?)
pluperfect - I had been dreaming (?I dreamt?)

There is certainly a hint of distance in the "I dreamt of far away lands and never dreamed that one day I would visit them".

Also, as may have been said by someone else, "smelled" feels like it is an action while smelt is more of a state.

E.g "the fire burned all night but the sausages did not get any more burnt"

In many cases "dreamt", "burnt", "learnt" are nouns or adjectives (the burnt sausage, the learnt phrased (and always a learn-ed expression, never a learnt one).

And sometimes it's how it fits into the rest of the sentence
e.g.
"the house was burnt" vs "the house burned all night"
"the lesson was learnt" vs "the lesson was learned by the class"