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

[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...