There’s an interesting post at the Log today in which Geoff Pullum surprised me by writing:
At some time in the middle 1970s, Deirdre Wilson and I noticed that we had never seen the past participle of the verb stride anywhere. In fact we didn’t even know what it was. When you stride off, what is it that you’ve done? How would it be described? Have you strided? Have you strode? Have you stroded? Have you stridden? Have you strodden? We realized that we hadn’t a clue. None of them sounded familiar or even mildly acceptable to us as native speakers.
As I said in the thread:
I am American and spontaneously produced stridden (which I’m pretty sure I’ve actually used in speech); so did my wife, though since she had a British-born father her testimony may be tainted. At any rate, it is clearly a ridiculous overstatement to say it does not exist or is never used. The OED says, quite properly, “The pa. pple. rarely occurs.”
A number of other people also said stridden seemed natural to them. One commenter said “This reminds me of the fact that in Russian, there are a couple of nouns which lack a genitive plural form (but have all the usual forms, including a genitive singular). The word for ‘poker’ (the thing you find by a fireplace) is one of them.” To this I responded:
You’re thinking of кочерга [kochergá] ‘poker,’ which has a perfectly good genitive plural, кочерёг [kocheryóg]. But it’s not often used and isn’t intuitively obvious, so Russians can have a hard time coming up with it, as in a famous Zoshchenko story from 1939, “The Poker,” in which a factory director is trying to order five pokers (the numbers five and above requiring the genitive plural for the following noun) and in dictating his letter says “I urgently request the shipping of five… What the hell? I don’t remember how to write it: five koche… Three kochergi is clear. Four kochergi, no problem. But five.. what? Five…” The secretary tries to help by running through the declension: “Who, what? kocherga. Of whom, of what? kochergi. To whom, to what? kocherge…” But when he gets to the plural, the secretary says it’s swirling around in his head and he can’t remember it. Finally a clever member of the staff rewords it so it reads “We have six stoves and need a separate poker for each of them rather than the one we have now, so we need an additional five.” A very funny story.
Another commenter really riled me by writing “One time I heard someone say, ‘I used to could do that.’ It’s wrong in at least two different ways when you analyze it, but she did manage to get a ‘plain’ form out of ‘can’. Despite it’s incorrectness…” I tried to remain civil:
No, no, no, no. It is not “incorrect” or “wrong” just because it’s not part of your dialect. It is a perfectly good construction common in southern dialects; since I have Ozark forebears I am familiar with it and sometimes use it myself. English is a house of many mansions; let’s try not to pare it down to a puny one-room hut, eh?
“He strode into the room.” That’s easy. “He, having stridden into the room, picked up a poker…” sounds right to me too, probably because of “ridden”. But does this sound right:-“Having stridden many miles, he felt thirsty”?
Ah hae ma doots. But if you make it a little archaic:-
“Having stridden many a mile, he felt thirsty”
it sounds better, don’t you think?
He strides.
She strode.
We have stridden.
I am strident.
The cricket is stridulent.
Fats Waller played stride piano. Could he have been said to have stridden the keyboard?
I read Geoff Pullum’s post and thought about it. The form that sounds most natural to me is “I have strode” and if pushed that’s the one I’d probably use. On the other hand I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to use it in my life.
For the record I’m in the UK West Midlands, though I don’t know if there’s likely to be any specific regional variation.
For some reason I think I like strode best, stridden second. SAE speaker.
I’m a proficient ESL speaker and although I realised I had never seen the forms, stride/strode/stridden immediately came to my mind.
I’d avoid it, but if pushed I’d say have strode. I wouldn’t use stridden in a million years, it looks like a typo.
What we have here is a difference of opinion.
Heck, the online dictionaries have both, but give strode first place. I’ve not used stridden, and probably won’t.
The question of past participles is timely because last week I was entertaining a silly thought about sit and sat, and how many other ‘it’ words have the past tense ‘at’. Could fat be the past tense of fit? And tat of tit?
I’ll leave out the other definitive one.
I’ve heard that joke about кочерга, except they ended up making two orders: one for three and one for two.
My thoughts on reading the opening:
‘Strode’ right? No… ‘I have strode’ sounds funny. So it must be ‘stridden’… ‘I have stridden into the room’? No I haven’t. Have i ‘strided’? ‘strod’? ‘strid’? I guess i don’t have a word for this.
Stress on I. i don’t doubt that others have one of these words. Well I kinda doubt anyone has ‘strod’.
The ‘poker’ story reminds me of David Sedaris’ hilarious piece Go Carolina. Averse to ‘s’ because of his lisp, when he was younger he found workarounds for plurals and possessives:
“it was easier to say nothing than to announce that the left-hand and the right-hand glove of Janet had fallen on the floor.”
I suspect that the first phase of the replacement of a strong form by a weak one is often a simple reluctance to produce the form at all. But “stride” may be in a holding pattern because it’s an upscale word, only much used by people of a literary turn, who tend to be afraid of making mistakes. So rather than replace the missing form, they just keep doing without.
Sheesh! I’m one of the great unwashed and under-educated that are the true font of all that is good and holy and Right according to a certain Tina Fey impersonator, and yet, this has had me all tied up. I’ve finally decided on stridden because of the more common ridden. If it’s ride, rode, ridden, then stride, strode, stridden will do me. That said, the tortuous circumlocutory avoidance option is still my first instinct.
‘Stridden’ also sounds best to me, but I’m one of those who have strengthened ‘sneaked’ to ‘snuck’, so perhaps I’m tainted. There is much to be said for “tortuous circumlocutory avoidance” in many circumstances, but one should stride boldly forward in this case, and having once stridden, never apologize!
Okay. Who has striven and who has strove to avoid the past participle of stride?
If the politicians wave the flag, does that mean that down through history they wove the flag, and more importantly have they wivven the flag for the last time?
holding pattern…upscale word…literary turn
Yeah? Besides silly, what word describes John Cleese walking?
To have strode along in the holding pattern behind John Cleese was certainly an upscale experience for us people what are of a literary turn.
And if you need more examples check out the first sentence here. Further down, in the Comments, John Emerson asks the question, “Hey, where’s the dirt on Kotsko and Holbo?” Probably he was invoking. But since John Emerson and James Woods both make appearances here, doesn’t that automatically make “have strode” the more handy, practical and streamlined usage? I think so.
On a related matter, do Americans tend to say “The ship sunk” rather than “The ship sank”? I fear they may.
They don’t let ships sink in Amerika.
Sank and sunk are both acceptable past tense forms; I have no idea which is more common. If you’re that insistent on historically accurate formations, I trust you use shotten as the past participle of shoot.
Being an ESL speaker, I´d have used “stridden”, too (on account of ride /ridden). If you had asked me what “wivven” means, though, I´d have guessed that it might be Old English for the plural of wife.
I don’t think you can say “use ‘stridden’, on account of ride /ridden” – they’re irregular verbs because they don’t follow rules, dammit. On the basis that “seethe” becomes “sodden”, I think you’re as entitled to say that “stride” becomes “strudden” as anything …
There is no past participle wivven. It’s I wife, I was wiffing, I have wifed.
Wow, these comments are riffen with quirky astrides.
If it’s
and
then why can’t it be
Sank and sunk are both acceptable past tense forms; I have no idea which is more common.
Sank and drank are more standard past tense forms in Australia than sunk and drunk, though these are also heard. Sometimes sank and drank conversely occur as participles. On the street, at least.
The -ing verbs are interesting. Most go -ing, -ung, -ung rather than -ing, -ang, -ung, but several have -ang for the past tense archaically and dialectally, according to SOED. Cases include sting, swing, and wring. Spring is uncertain. It has holden on to the form sprang in Britain and Australia, but appears to have lost it in the Land of the Free.
I hope this has holpen.
(How that our linkuage is weft of strange strands, in straunge strondes!)
(Assuming that this wasn’t just a very subtle joke–) It’s hard to say without knowing what dictionaries you’re looking at, but I’d imagine they give strode before stridden because they give the preterite before the past participle, not because they count strode an equally acceptable option for the latter.
I was equally surprised at Geoff Pullum’s comment. Although I don’t remember ever having had occasion to use the word, I’m pretty sure “stridden” would have come quite automatically, and if I had heard anything else from another speaker it would have sounded ood.
“Sounded ood”: I like that!
Strode, strood, strooden.
grin, grind, ground, grounded
“I have wived”
Ah, yes – I have indeed. And occasionally I have husbanded.
I’d say “stridden”, too, first, because of ride — rode — ridden; second, because of German (schreiten — schritt — geschritten — yes, the /t/ is missing, maybe you folks inserted it into the /sr/ cluster like the Czechs have done); and third, because the word is rather archaic/poetic in the first place, and strong formations tend to sound more archaic than weak ones, even if they aren’t.
Man. 😮 We have this exact same irregularity in German: sieden — gesotten. Note the exact 1 : 1 sound correspondences.
(To my embarrassment, I can’t think of the past tense. Has to be sott, but I bet I’ve never encountered it. The past participle has become restricted to literature, while the present tense is used as a technical term for “to boil”, so it took me a long time to figure out that they actually belong together in the first place, and the past tense as a whole is a purely written form for me anyway, except for “be” and “want”.)
While I am at it: schießen — schoss — geschossen (note the utter, complete, and total lack of a vowel correspondence in the present tense, though perhaps Schütze “shooter, marksman, Sagittarius” helps bridge that gap); helfen — half — geholfen.
There’s at least one strong English verb which is identical in conjugation and meaning to the German. Can’t remember which.
There’s at least one strong English verb which is identical in conjugation and meaning to the German. Can’t remember which.
stride, stridex, stridden
If I had to choose, the most instinctive choice would be none of the above. The next most instinctive choice would be stridden, but something about it bothers me. Maybe the Stridex zit creme.
Кочерёг??? I have never heard of that! although I frequently use them. But yes, the Institute of Russian Language seems to agree quite resolutely. “Anyway, we should move to steam heating ASAP,” as Zoshenko concludes.
That’s why I think it’s a good comparison to “stridden”: it sounds weird to a lot of native speakers.
About the avoidance of Кочерёг:
There is a similar problem in French (at least in France): how to say neuf oeufs “nine eggs”. The plural oeufs is pronounced as if the f did not exist, and the word neuf is usually pronounced with final [f] except in front of a vowel in the frozen contexts neuf ans “nine years” which sounds like neuvans. The problem is that pronouncing the [f] in neuf oeufs as [v] sounds weird to most people, but it also does with the [f]. Also, neuvoeufs sounds almost like the word neveu “nephew”. One solution is to add a plural-sounding [z] to the number word, but neufz oeufs sounds illiterate.
I read an account by an English-speaking linguist who tried to elicit the pronunciation from a French egg vendor: Je voudrais des oeufs, s’il vous plaît – j’en voudrais neuf (I would like some eggs please, nine of them). The vendor counted the eggs into a bag: Voilà monsieur, neuf beaux oeufs! (Here you are sir, nine beautiful eggs!). The word beaux (pronounced [boz] before the vowel) prevents the awkwardness, and the [z] of the plural is more satisfying before a plural noun than the unusual [f] in that position. The sound [z] is also heard in the majority of contexts when counting eggs: deux oeufs (2), trois oeufs (3), six oeufs (6), dix oeufs (10) and douze oeufs (12), and of course in des oeufs “(some) eggs”).
“seethe” becomes “sodden” – We have this exact same irregularity in German: sieden — gesotten. The past participle has become restricted to literature, while the present tense is used as a technical term for “to boil”, so it took me a long time to figure out that they actually belong together in the first place
“Sodden” lost its primary meaning of “boiled” in English a long time ago, and now means merely “soaked thoroughly”, and it was only coming across a late 16th century writer talking about brewers becoming rich from selling “sodden water”, which sounds very odd to modern ears, that made me turn to a dictionary and discover the connection with “seethe”. I doubt many native English speakers today even realise “seethe” means “boil”, since it’s almost always used metaphorically now, as in “seething with anger”. Not coincidentally, I’m sure, madida in Latin also meant both “soaked” and “boiled” – obviously a lot of conceptual cross-over there …
Another version of the poker story (in Russian here) has an agency with an “ordinary vulgar furnace” and receiving back the following note (automatically translated by Google), “Already there spring. Потом будет лето. Then will the summer. До зимы далеко. Before the winter off. Об отоплении думать пока что не приходится. On heating thinking has not yet been accounted for. Весной хорошо думать о грамотности, хотя бы в связи с весенними испытаниями в средней школе. Spring is well to think about literacy, at least in connection with spring testing in high school. Что же касается данного слова, то слово действительно каверзное, доступное Академии наук и машинистке с тридцатилетним стажем. With regard to this word, the word really tricky, affordable Academy of Sciences and the typist with three decades of experience. В общем, надо поскорей переходить на паровое отопление. In general, you should quickly move to steam.”
I too had never been aware of a connection between seethe (a word found in the Bible) and sodden, so it is great to learn of the link.
zythophile: Latin madida ?? where does this word comes from? if it means soaked, boiled (the common meaning must refer to submersion in water) it should be a participle, but this word does not look like one. Can you tell us more?
Everyone is approaching this question from the standpoint of construction, but isn’t that a sort of prescriptionist attitude? I mean, think about it. Why do we have language in the first place? To use it.
And how is the word stride used? I think of it as maybe what the Jolly Green Giant does, but definitely in a Gothic romance where the governess meets the bad boy/heir to the mansion for the first time and notices his manly manliness. He strides into the room. He strides across the heath. He strides to the stable and his horse strides too. And when he is enraged (but only about his frail old mother or social injustice) he strides out of the room. Stride is a larger than life cartoon word–it expresses strength and directness. So how are you going to take a word like that and use it as a past participle. I mean, that’s only slightly less convoluted and effeminate than passive voice, the ultimate weasel construction.
And then there’s the sound of the word. “Stride” has a nice open expansive sound, like taking a big step. Same with “strode”. If you put it in any sentence, it will be the word that takes over. But stridden? It has that unfortunate double “d” sound thing doing on. “di-di”…kind of like baby talk… goo-goo, da-da, poo-poo…and if you put it together with have or has, you have the additional tongue twisting feat of pronouncing a str- after a z or v sound. Not a Gothic hero sound at all. And how would it look in a comic book frame? Silly.
“I mean, that’s only slightly less convoluted and effeminate than passive voice, the ultimate weasel construction. ”
Isn’t THAT a prescriptivist sort of attitude, using a pejorative, and highly subjective, word like “weasel” to describe the passive voice? I get why one shouldn’t overuse it, but your contempt for it is an attitude that is de rigeur among prescriptivists and is also an attitude I’ve never been able to understand.
I don’t know Nijma. The Jolly Green Giant isn’t exactly John Wayne.
Marie-Lucie, how do you yourself say neuf oeufs?
Can it be done with a glottal stop: neu’ oeufs?
using a pejorative, and highly subjective, word like “weasel” to describe the passive voice
Which construction is more accepted by Americans:
Your taxes were raised.
Congressman Ima Spender raised your taxes.
You better believe the second construction is the one Americans want to hear. To be sure, there are some valid uses for passive voice, but some non-native speakers think putting everything and anything into passive voice is a matter of prestige.
And if you’re trying to create a narrative of a dashing bold hero, you don’t use a lot of complex sentence structure, or something that has to be parsed carefully, not when he’s about to gallop off a rescue little Nell from the railroad tracks. You want to use language that sounds bold and direct.
I find the above deeply offensive.
We weasels use the word “human” to describe passive voice.
Having stridden into the room, I picked up a poker.
I strode into the room. I picked up a poker.
Latin madida ?? where does this word comes from?
Marie-Lucie, it’s the adjective mădidus, a, um, and the particular passage I was thinking of is from Pliny, Hist Nat 14.29.149: “est et Occidentis populis sua ebrietas fruge madida, pluribus modis per Gallias Hispaniasque nominibus aliis, sed ratione eadem.” – “There is a particular intoxication too among western peoples, with madida grains, [made] in many ways among Gauls and Hispanians, with various names, but the same technique.” This is a famous quote among beer historians, and madida is always translated as “soaked” (as in, for example, Max Nelson, The Barbarian’s Beverage, p 54), but Lewis and Short say the word can also mean “boiled soft, sodden”. Without boring you with the details, technically we can’t be sure if Pliny was describing soaking the grains – part of the malting process – or boiling (strictly, infusing with very hot water) the (malted) grain, and it would be interesting (well, interesting for beer historians) to know which he meant …
AJP: Marie-Lucie, how do you yourself say neuf oeufs?
With reluctance! I would say neuf oeufs but feeling that I should really say neuv oeufs if it didn’t also sound so strange.
Can it be done with a glottal stop: neu’ oeufs?
NO, that doesn’t sound French at all.
The only thing that sounds natural is neuf[z] oeufs but as I said before, that is not standard, since there is no plural suffix in the word neuf. There are other cases though in which popular speech adds a plural suffix to a number word, as in quatre[z] officiers “four officers” (in an old folk song) or in the expression se regarder entre quat'[z] yeux ‘to (get closer to each other and) stare at each other fixedly’ literally “to look at each other among four eyes” (implying a standoff, not adoring gazes). Since the plural word yeux “eyes” (quite different from its singular oeil) is normally found immediately after a preceding article or other word indicating the plural, eg les yeux where the s is pronounced [z], there is also the familiar, almost slangy verb zyeuter “to look at”.
zythophile: thank you for the explanation. I had not thought about the possibility that the word was an adjective rather than a participle. I wonder if the root mad- in Latin madid- is related to mal- in English malt? A change between [l] and [d] is not impossible (witness Latin lingua related to English tongue, where the initial [t] comes from a [d]). I will try to look it up, unless someone else finds the answer first.
There’s to eye, in English.
We say among four eyes in Norwegian too, but to mean ‘between ourselves’.
There’s to eye, in English.
I did not understand this sentence at first but you must mean “to eye”, as a verb (there is a reason for putting some words between quotes, or in italics).
Yes, it is the same idea, but the French word is not derived from the singular oeil but the plural yeux, and there are two irregularities from the point of view of Standard French word formation, but both fully justified by the pronunciation and use of the noun in context: the prefixation of a z which comes from a plural suffix which does not actually belong to the noun but from a previous word, and the addition of a verbal suffix starting with t where one might expect another z since yeux is plural (and therefore potentially ending in the sound z if followed by a vowel): a more regular form would be yeuser, but that form does not exists, only zyeuter (which is not Standard, unlike “to eye” in English – you would probably not find it in a newpaper article, for instance).
Yes, I don’t like to use quotes unless I feel the sense would become confused without them, which it obviously did in this case.
Zyeuter‘s the kind of surprising word that would be fun to use if my French were better. Still it’s delightful to know. I’ll work it into a conversation one way or another.
Marie-Lucie – I wonder if the root mad- in Latin madid- is related to mal- in English malt?
We’re well outside my knowledge comfort zone here (trans. “I haven’t got a clue”), but there’s a conceptual linkage, at least, that of softening – things that are boiled are generally softened, the OED says of “malt” that it’s “probably … related to Old High German malz soft”, and the Celtic word for malt, braich (in Old Irish mraich), which is the source of the French brasser, to brew, is linked by Pokorny, at any rate, to Indo-European words with meanings including soft, rotten, flaccid and the like, such as Latin marcidus.
Zythophile, thank you. It seems that initial m is linked to those sorts of meanings (and the sensations associated with them) in many languages, witness for example the aversion of some English speakers to “moist”. A close relationship between the l, d and r of the words under consideration seems quite possible.
…a conceptual linkage, at least, that of softening – things that are boiled are generally softened, the OED says of “malt” that it’s “probably … related to Old High German malz soft”…
Yes. A morbid mass of words, including those associated with Greek μαλακία (“softness”). This is itself a thoroughly unwholesome word in the modern language, in which it can mean “masturbation” – culturally construed as self-pollution, self-abuse, unmanly “softness” (not, I think, “unwomanly”; but I am ready to be corrected).
Direct English relatives include osteomalacia (“softening of bones due to the gradual disappearance of earthy salts; also called malacosteon“), and a whole rotting heap of others.
The confusion over the genitive plural of кочерга arises from the fact that it is one of those words where the ‘р’ lost its palatalization in the 18th century (as with перьвый > первый – Falconet’s 1782 Bronze Horseman carries the inscription ‘Петру перьвому’). The word must originally have been кочерьга to produce the gen.pl. кочерёг. A quick scan of google books confirms this with lots of examples of кочерьга from the 18th and early 19th centuries.
An essential point that I hadn’t seen mentioned before—many thanks!
I only just noticed German streiten, which normally means “to quarrel”, but also “to fight in a war” in poetic language. It goes stritt, gestritten.
Interesting. Modern German Malz exclusively means “malt”.
Not by means of regular sound shifts, though.
*lightbulb moment*
Here’s the OED1 etymology of stride from 1919 (italics omitted):
If anything, the uncertainty has become worse over the past century.
How about stride, strode, strode? As, famously, in this sentence.
Dumbledore had strode alone into the Forest to rescue her from the centaurs; how he had done it — how he had emerged from the trees supporting Professor Umbridge without so much as a scratch on him — nobody knew, and Umbridge was certainly not telling.
(Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 38)
Rowling is very fond of the preterite strode, and apparently not averse to extending its functionality. Anyway, she’s one of the very few modern writers who have had the guts to risk using any past participle of stride.
Curiously the ambiguity is the same in Swedish and has so been since at least 16th c. There is the weak strida – stridde – stritt use along with the strong strida – stred – stridit. The latter follows the pattern of some thirty common (originally class I Gmc strong verbs).
Today the strong variety is what I hear, read and use. Just like in English the expected past participle however is absent. It would be stridet (neuter sing.) but I’ve neither seen nor heard it. The weak variety is there at least in some compounds: an idea can be omstridd, disputed (litt. ‘about-quarrelled’), or even bestridd, gainsaid, denied. The modern meaning of ‘strida’ is in the area of conflict, fight, struggle, argue, quarrel.
How odd!
If Old English forms had developed regularly without any morphological reworking, we would have slide / slode / slidden, glide / glode / glidden (strong, Class I), but hide / hid / hid (weak).
The No. verb å stri – strir – strei – stridd means “toil, struggle” in the sense of laborious work or emotional hardship: Å stri med leksene “Struggling with the homework”, Han har sitt å stri med “He’s having his problems”. The noun stri means a period of intense work: Julestria “the preparations for Christmas”. The adjective stri means “stubborn, intense, tough” of people, “hard” of conditions, and “strong” about a river’s current.
This is identical to German (umstritten, bestritten) and apparently rather different from Norwegian, so I suspect German influence.
Bestridden (by sb/sth) can be used in (very stilted) English in the sense ‘dominated, overshadowed’. G. K. Chesterton was just the kind of author to use bestridden:
Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.
http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/chester/innofb04.htm
PS. Here the meaning is at least partly literal (Mr. Crook was sitting astride on the wall). Here’s a fully figurative use of the word by the same writer:
But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European adventure, is quite opposite.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/heretics.v.html
A spirit bestrides Europe …
A spirit goes “Um…” in Europe.
David M.: apparently rather different from Norwegian, so I suspect German influence.
The prefigated forms are practically identical in Norwegian. And do suspekt German influence.
The original Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, ’A spectre is haunting Europe’, is in the Swedish translation ’Ett spöke går runt’ (around) ’i Europa’.
A cognate-faithful translation of ’geht um’, ’går om’ would in modern Swedish mean that the spectre ‘bypasses’ or ‘overtakes’ Europe. Maybe that’s what finally happened – it found the Realm of the Middle to be a more happy h(a)unting ground.
The original Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, ’A spectre is haunting Europe’, is in the Swedish translation ’Ett spöke går runt’ (around) ’i Europa’.
Isn’t that what “geht um” means? I thought the haunting was just an English-translation flourish.
Wiktionary says there are two different verbs umgehen; the inseparable one means ‘avoid, bypass’, but the separable one means ‘handle, deal with; circulate (in); (of ghosts) haunt’. Note the similar ambiguity of English go around, though it cannot mean ‘haunt’. So yes, “a specter is haunting Europe” is perfectly correct, though “a spirit is circulating in Europe” works too.
Haunt has an interesting etymology: in older English it meant ‘practice habitually, concern oneself with’ < Old French hanter ‘resort to, be familiar with’ < Old Norse heimta ‘bring home’, says Etymonline. Shakespeare was the first on record to use it of spirits: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Demetrius says to Helena “I charge thee, hence, and do not haunt me thus”, where Helena is quite alive, and he simply means “Don’t hang around with me”, but when Quince catches sight of Bottom with the ass’s head on, he shouts “We are haunted”, and finally Oberon asks Puck “How now, mad spirit! / What night-rule now about this haunted grove?” The play also contains the noun haunts, still current in the sense ‘a place one often goes to’, which reflects the older verbal meaning.
the separable one means ‘handle, deal with; circulate (in); (of ghosts) haunt’.
Huh! You learn something every day.
It’s a poor day that I only learn one new thing.
Isn’t that what “geht um” means?
Of course Hat, but I referred to the cognate to ‘um’, which in Swedish is ‘om’. Rund ‘(a)round’ is the same in our languages. The final -t in the Swedish word is just the adverb marker – a spectre walks (around, in a roundish way) in Europe.
Correct, though “circulate” is rather obsolescent.
And as it happens, the infinitive is a nice minimal pair for stress: [ˈ]umgehen (further [ˈ]umging/ging [ˈ]um, [ˈ]umgegangen) is what bedsheet-shaped ghosts do and also “handle, deal with”, um[ˈ]gehen (um[ˈ]ging, um[ˈ]gangen) is “bypass, circumvent, avoid having to deal with a difficulty”.
…It does!
rather obsolescent
But still current in 1848, I presume.
Correct, though “circulate” is rather obsolescent.
You mean, as meaning for umgehen in German? I don’t know, you frequently get expressions like “ein Virus geht um” etc., and then even police detectives gehen um… 😉 I’d rather say it’s somewhat semantically restricted.
Thinking of it, Norwegian even has class 1 conjugation of verbs like gli “glide”, skli “slide”, skite “shit”, grine “cry, grin”, sive “seave” and doubtless more.
Come on, Trond – you can do better than those five. It took me less than 15 minutes to out of memory find these class I verbs in Swedish. They all follow the pattern: Infinitive: bita, present: biter, preterite: bet, past preterite (‘have/has/had bitten’): bitit, past participle (‘am/are/is bitten’): biten (common gender); bitet (neuter); bitna (plural), optative (‘may you bite’ – archaic): bite, subjunctive (‘if you bit’ – rapidly getting archaic): bete, Imperative: bit!.
Bita – (bite)
Bli(va) – (become)
Driva – (drive, push – not though operate a vehicle)
Fisa – (fart – a ’silent’ one, i.e. onomatopoeia)
Glida – (glide)
Gnida – (rub / be greedy)
Gripa – (seize, capture, grasp)
Kliva – (stride)
Knipa – (pinch, tighten)
Kvida – (whine)
Lida – (suffer)
Niga – (curtsy)
Pipa – (sqeak, chirp, cheep)
Rida – (ride)
Riva – (scratch / grate / tear down)
Skina – (shine)
Skita – (shit)
Skrida – (glide, stride)
Skrika – (scream, yell)
Skriva – (write)
Slita – (tear / toil down)
Smita – (run away, evade, dodge)
Snika – (be greedy / lurk)
Sprida – (spread)
Stiga – (rise, ascend /step)
Strida – (fight, struggle)
Svida – (smart, sting)
Svika – (decieve, desert)
Tiga – (be silent / remain silent)
Vika – (fold / yield)
Vina – (whistle – about the wind)
Vrida – (turn, twist)
I can do a lot better. I should have made clear that I meant to list verbs that sound odd as class 1 strong verbs to anglophone ears. Additions from your list are bite “bite”, hvine “whine, squeek”.
The surviving English class 1 strong verbs are bide, bite, chide, drive, ride, rise, shine, shrive, slide, smite, stride, strike, write. In addition, hide, strive, thrive are originally weak (strive took a detour through Old French) but now have the class 1 pattern, the latter two perhaps by analogy with drive. In some cases, it is the old preterite singular in /o/ that is preserved (write, wrote); in other cases, the preterite plural in /ɪ/ has survived (bite, bit). In addition, shine and slide use the preterite as a participle, strike has done the same except when it means ‘remove part of a text’, and there are various other deviations.
There is a whole class of these Germanic > French > English words that can create pseudo-cognates and pseudo-relatives in Modern English: for example, choose is native < OE ceosan, but the “obviously related” choice gets into the language via Central French choix, itself of Germanic origin. The OE word cire ‘choice’ was probably lost because s/r alternation made its relationship to choose less obvious.
bite
Ouch, that bote!
The jumps from weak to strong conjugation and reverse are all ove the place even when it comes to Swedish verbs. My list was totally indiscriminate in this respect. It just reflected modern Swedish use.
Always in German, it seems, except for the lengthening of vowels in monosyllabic words that didn’t end in a long consonant. Using the handy list for illustration:
beißen – biss – gebissen
bleiben – blieb – geblieben (“stay, remain”)
treiben – trieb – getrieben (not applied to any vehicles)
–
gleiten – glitt – geglitten
–
greifen – griff – gegriffen
– (can’t quite remember if there’s an obsolete cognate)
kneifen – kniff – gekniffen (regional, but accepted as standard)
–
leiden – litt – gelitten (leiten “lead” is weak)
– (neigen “bend down, incline” is weak)
pfeifen – pfiff – gepfiffen (“whistle”; I wonder if the meaning changed because of the sound shift – mice and bird hatchlings still make piep…)
reiten – ritt – geritten (not applied to any vehicles)
reiben – rieb – gerieben (“rub”)
scheinen – schien – geschienen (“seem”; “shine” is, at least prescriptively, weak: scheinen – scheinte – gescheint)
scheißen – schiss – geschissen
schreiten – schritt – geschritten (“stride”; literary)
schreien – schrie – geschrien (obsolescent geschrieen)
schreiben – schrieb – geschrieben
verschleißen – verschliss – verschlissen (“wear down” of replaceable parts)
schmeißen – schmiss – geschmissen (dysphemism for “throw”; earlier “smear”, “besmirch with filth”, hence Schmeißfliege “blowfly”)
– (spreizen is weak)
steigen – stieg – gestiegen
streiten – stritt – gestritten (“quarrel”, poetically “fight, struggle”)
–
–
– (schweigen, schwieg, geschwiegen fits the meaning, while zeigen “show, point” is weak)
weichen – wich – gewichen
–
–
Ja, weil der junge Werther gelitten hat und der Vater so spät durch Nacht und Wind mit seinem Sohn geritten hat, haben die Vögelein in Walde geschwiegen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther
http://ingeb.org/Lieder/werreite.html
http://german.about.com/library/blwander.htm
geritten ist
Thank you Hans! This is really a challenge for a Swede. We have adapted a particular form for the past preterite and named it ‘supine’. In weak verbs it’s identical with the past participle. But in strong verbs it is formed from the neuter variety of the past participle but with the suffix -et changed into -it. This in turn is a result of a dialectal split in pronunciation of the p. ptc. suffix. In central eastern Sweden it was (is) ‘-it’ and in central western Sweden ‘-et’.
So today we have: ‘hingsten blev riden’, (the stallion was ridden), ‘stoet blev ridet’, (the mare was ridden – yes a mare is neuter in Swedish) and ‘hästarna blev ridna’, (the horses were ridden).
But if we have started a ride in the past we can always use the ‘supine’: ‘vi har ridit’, (we have ridden). When we then try to speak German we feel lost when to use ‘ist’ and when to use ‘hat’. The confusion in this case became worse when I checked ‘reiten’ in Duden http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/reiten
They give seven ‘Bedeutungen und Beispile’. In three of them they say that both ‘ist’ and ‘hat’ is possible and give the example: er hat seit frühester Jugend geritten (den Reitsport betrieben), ist viel geritten. In the other four ‘Bedeutungen’ they however only give ‘hat’. Example: ich habe das Pferd müde geritten. Tricky, to put it mildly. I never miss ‘er ist gegangen’ though, since it is still alive in Swedish: ‘han är gången’ (but more rare than the supine construction: ‘han har gått’).
I never miss ‘er ist gegangen’ though
Gone, come, become were the last survivors of participles with be in English. In the King James Version (1611, but orthography modernized) we still have verses like 1 Samuel 4:7, “And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into the camp.” Compare on the one hand the New International Version (1973-2011): “[T]he Philistines were afraid. ‘A god has come into the camp,’ they said”, and on the other the Luther Bible: “[F]ürchteten sie sich und sprachen: Gott ist ins Lager gekommen.”
We still do have oppositions like “The door is closed” vs. “The door has closed”, but the first uses the adjective closed in predicative position, and reflects the current state of the door, whereas the second is the true participle, and reflects the history of the door.
Yes, perfect with sein oder haben is one of those idiosyncrasies of German. I always trip over the parfait for être in French – in German, it’s ist gewesen with sein, but in French it’s a été with avoir…
In central eastern Sweden it was (is) ‘-it’ and in central western Sweden ‘-et’.
Somwhat oddly eastern Norwegian corresponds with central eastern Swedish and western Norwegian with central western Swedish. Sort of. In eastern dialects strong past participles/ supines are formed with -i*): sitte – satt – har sitti, hive – heiv – har hivi, skyte – skøyt**) – har skyti. Western dialects are close to the standard Nynorsk paradigm: sitje – sat – har sete, hive – heiv – har heve/er heve(n), skjote – skaut – har skote/er skote(n).
*) competing with weakish participles for many verbs: hivd, skutt.
**) skøyt is innovative for skaut. There are two explanations that I know of. One is that it’s a re-dialectification of Dano-Norwegian skjøt, the other that it’s analogical from class 1 -i- – -ei- – -i-.
Somwhat oddly
Not so odd: core vs. periphery.
core vs. periphery
Maybe. But Eastern Norwegian usually sides with Western Central Swedish. OTOH, I think it also sides more with Northern Central Swedish than Southern Central Swedish, so maybe this Swedish isogloss is more North-South than East-West. But that doesn’t really fit the Norwegian distribution.
(My previous comment seems to say that the examples of Western forms are exactly following standard Nynorsk. They aren’t, not in all forms, but they’re pretty close.)
…I probably wouldn’t even say that.
On the other hand, I always say ist gesessen and ist gelegen.* North of the White Sausage Equator or whatever, it’s more or less sein with verbs of motion and haben with everything else, while south of that it’s increasingly sein with states and haben with actions. Geschlafen sein is still considered wrong by everyone, but it pops up every once in a while; I expect that in a few decades people won’t correct themselves anymore when they just said it.
* And therefore ist gestanden from stehen “stand”, but hat gestanden from gestehen “confess a crime”.
No, that’s not an option. 🙂 The finite-verb-second rule is so strong that even “Quoth the raven” hasn’t been allowed in a thousand years. The obvious way out is [Da] fürchteten sie sich, “there (in this new situation) they were afraid”.
Weiß ich nicht “dunno” is acceptable; demonstrative pronouns in the accusative may be dropped from the first position, so the finite verb in the second position is stranded at the beginning of the sentence. That’s the only exception. Everything else that begins with a finite verb form is a question.
ist gelegen
The trouble here is that even people who say hat gelegen for ‘lay down’ will say ist gelegen for ‘is convenient’, and can in principle say either for ‘is/was located at’, for gelegen is an adjective as well as a participle.
Here’s a bit of Finnegans Wake Chapter 3.1, the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper:
Needless to say, Ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon is not, despite its rather Hellenic appearance, a junior synonym for Coccinella septempunctata L., the European ladybird beetle.
No, that’s not an option.
Yeah, I realized that in hindsight. The trouble is that the German sentence overlaps the verse boundary. In full, 1 Sam 4:6-7 reads:
So you can’t just chop it without rearranging the words, unlike the English versions.
Constructions with copula + past participle are actually very frequent in Swedish provided that the verb is compunded, typically with a preposition. Mina barn är utflugna, litt. ‘my children are out-flown’ (i.e. have moved from my home) or fallet är avslutat, ’the case is off-finished’ (i.e. closed) etc. are all over the place. The second example is also possible with a ‘have’ construction: fallet har avslutats but it requires the final –s passive marker, ‘the case has been closed’. I don’t think that Swedes in general think of these participles as adjectives (even though they of course can be used adjectivally: ett avslutat fall, ‘a closed case’).
Word order is as strong a marker in Swedish as in German. Initial finite verb in a main clause = question – period. (In the indicative mode, that is. Utterances in imperative, optative, subjunctive or in subordinate clauses are another story).
*taken aback*
That must be one of the cases where Luther stuck way too close to the Latin original, quite contrary to what he thunderously preached (and practiced in other cases).
[…] da […] fürchteten sie sich und sprachen 🙂
The finite-verb-second rule is so strong that even “Quoth the raven” hasn’t been allowed in a thousand years
Not that people don’t keep trying:
Sprach der Rabe: „Nimmermehr!“
*taken aback*
No need! The standard explanation is that the subordinate clause Da aber die Philister hörten das Geschrei solches Jauchzens as a whole is considered as an adverbial in the main clause, i.e. X sprachen sie and thus not violating but complying with the V2 rule.
Yeah; it doesn’t work, it sounds quite awkward.
That’s exactly the problem: it’s a subordinate clause (marked by aber not being followed by another conjunction… I think), meaning the finite verb should go at the end.
It sounds quite awkward
‘Sprach der Rabe’ ist doch Poesie! Goethe has one of each VSO, VS, and VOS in three short stanzas, worldwide known: Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein steh’n … Lief er schnell, es nah zu seh’n … Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach. So far nobody has protested, so it can’t sound that awkward. 🙂
My mistake concerning Luther. I thought it was the word order ‘sprachen sie’ you questioned, not the place of ‘hörten’ in dem Nebensatz. I should have known better.
Here’s the 1951 recension of the Schlachter translation, which has proper SOV order:
And the 2000 version, with only minor changes:
Unfortunately I don’t have the 1905 original handy.
That would be a bit like complaining about his famous rhyming of neige with Schmerzensreiche…
That would be a bit like complaining about his famous rhyming of neige with Schmerzensreiche…
Goethe gets a free pass on anything he does, he’s after all the apex of classical German literature. 😉
Also, it makes more sense if read with a Hessian Accent.
Yes to both.
By the way, what’s up with the construction “I was stood at the bar all night”? (Which I learned in England). It’s got some aspectual aspect, I’m sure. Some sort of perfective imperfect. (And it’s not the passive of the causative / transitive, by the way, you’d be sat at the bar, not set).
Sounds utterly weird to me.
I expected it would; it’s British informal register, maybe even a Southern England thing — I was in Reading. But I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in reported speech in the Guardian, so I assume it’s widely understood in Britain.
“I was installed at the bar all night”?
I think it might have originated up north but nowadays it’s all over, even Reading. There’s also “I was stood standing at the bar” (or wherever) for more emphasis.
“I was stood”
is just the same as
“I was standing”.
No more, no less.
Yes, that’s the pragmatics of it. A bit vague on who did the installing. But as I say, it’s not a passive, or if it is, it’s a weird one.
I think you can also be stood in a queue or be sat in a waiting room, where it’s not whether you chose to be there, but whether you wanted to be there for so long.
I was hoping to hear from someone whose native English has this, I just picked it up from colleagues.
Come to think of it, it reminds me of a jocular mock-passive construction in Danish where for instance you turn the intransitive Han gik (fra sin stilling) = ‘He left (his job)’ into ?Han blev gået = *’He got gone’ — adding an implicit oblique agent to a verb that doesn’t have one. It started as a joke, at least, but people are not surprised at the construction any more.
There’s similarly “sat” for ‘sitting’.
I make the same distinct shade of meaning as Lars (that sat/stood implies resentment/impatience) but the fact that my idiolect has only the -ing forms suggests I may be inventing a distinction. I suspect many if not most speakers have fixed “sat” as an irregular present participle, just as many nonstandard dialects merge preterite and past participle, and any alternation with “sitting” is a matter of register/code-switching rather than semantic distinctions. I surmise that “sat”-participle speakers retain “sitting” for the gerund.
Maybe the Basque antipassive is similar, but I won’t claim to understand that one either…!
The ironic reflexive passive – “he was fired behind the scenes, and then publicly mumbled something about spending more time with his family”? That’s widespread: he was resigned, he was disappeared. In Hebrew, I learned from a book by Guy Deutscher, they actually blended the vowel patterns for the reflexive and the passive to create this grammatical category.
Yes, “he was disappeared” is exactly parallel to the Danish construction I mean. But now I’m not sure if “I was stood” is the same. Could be an informal variation on the present continuous, as mollymooly says.
Maybe we can say that “I am sat in a waiting room” ascribes agency to someone else, while “I am sitting” is neutral? Sort of a mix between active and passive…
Lars 1.0: By the way, what’s up with the construction “I was stood at the bar all night”? (Which I learned in England). It’s got some aspectual aspect, I’m sure. Some sort of perfective imperfect.
Aspectually similar to Da. jeg blev stående. Here the present participle is durative or imperfective while the modal verb is inchoative or perfective (“my state became one of enduring standing”). In the English construction, the modal verb is inherently imperfect, and the perfect participle is applied to turn the meaning inchoative (“my state was one of having become standing”).
I make the same distinct shade of meaning as Lars (that sat/stood implies resentment/impatience) but the fact that my idiolect has only the -ing forms suggests I may be inventing a distinction.
I don’t use it myself, but I’ve spoken to enough people who do, mostly northerners, to know that there’s nothing implied that wasn’t in the -ing form. “Join us at the pub. We’re easy to find, we’re sat at the bar drinking bloody marys.”
I notice one can say “I were stood standing,” but not “We was sat sitting.” (were & was for added northernness.)
*’He got gone’
Compare Yego ushli ‘(They) have gone him. (ie they made him leave (his job, etc).’ in Russian.
I notice one can say “I were stood standing,” but not “We was sat sitting.” (were & was for added northernness.)
I’m not sure — I don’t know that I’ve heard anyone say the latter but it doesn’t sound impossible to me. Especially if you sprinkle in a couple of extra words: “We was all sat there, sitting in the corner…”
David L: “We was all sat there, sitting in the corner…”
Ok, but that’s not the same as “sat sitting”. Sat sitting in the same sense as “stood standing” just doesn’t exist, as far as I know.
@DM: Yes, hitputer (m. sg.), a templatic portmanteau of hitpater ‘resigned’ and putar ‘was fired’. It’s jokey, and AFAIK not used for other verb roots, though it can be inflected for tense, number and gender. The meaning is pretty clear even if you never heard this compound before.
The earliest I heard “to be disappeared”, with all its sinister implications, was in two different contexts: the book Catch-22, and reports on the Dirty War of Argentina and of Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s. I wonder how far back the term goes. The OED’s earliest mention of transitive disappear referring to people (4b., “To abduct or arrest (a person), esp. for political reasons, typically killing or imprisoning the individual, without making his or her fate known”) is 1965, four years after Catch-22.
> it’s not the passive of the causative / transitive, by the way, you’d be sat at the bar, not set
“Set” might etymologically be the causative of “sit”, but synchronously that would be “sit”, as in “I sat him down”.
> Aspectually similar to Da. jeg blev stående. Here the present participle is durative or imperfective while the modal verb is inchoative or perfective
“Blive” can also mean “stay” (cf German “bleiben”) and that’s the relevant sense in “blive stående/liggende/siddende/boende”.
English “stay put” comes to mind, another formally passive construction without much passive meaning. Does “stay sat” or “stay stood” work?
“Blive” can also mean “stay” (cf German “bleiben”) and that’s the relevant sense in “blive stående/liggende/siddende/boende”.
Huh, I see what you mean. Still, it’s definitely different in aspect from English was standing, and I think that’s due to a difference between bli and be, though that may rather be that bli is locational and temporal while be is bleached to copula. But in Norwegian the construction exists also with the (mostly Nynorsk) synonym verte “become”: Eg vart ståande og glo “I (was) stood gazing”.
“I was stood”
is just the same as
“I was standing”.
No more, no less.
(Brit here) Sorry to disagree with AJP again over colloquialisms, but for me “I was stood” is perfectly acceptable (a bit informal), and not at all ‘just the same’.
“was stood” suggests some sort of endurance/impatience or involuntary location. “I was stood at the bar all night because all the seats were taken.” “I was stood at the bar 20 minutes trying to get served.” “I was stood at the bar when this geezer came up to me.”
To put “standing” there would not carry the same attitude of the speaker to the situation.
> Eg vart ståande og glo
Interesting. Danish has different optional ways of marking the progressive aspect, one of which is “stå/sidde/ligge/gå/rende og [verb]” (stand/sit/lie/walk/run and _), in which the stå/sidde/ligge/gå/rende is a closed group, grammaticalized to mark the progressive and semantically fairly bleached (although it does have to match the state of the actor). But no progressive participle, and the second verb has to be in the same form as the first one: “jeg stod og gloede”.
At first glance I thought it was the same group that allowed “blive ~ende”, which also only allows a closed group of verbs, but it seems not. *”blive gående” (stay walking) and *”bo og (verb)” (reside and _) aren’t grammatical.
@dainichi, I’m not sure how closed that first group really is — it took me 20 seconds to come up with han kørte og ledte efter en parkeringsplads and æblet hang og ventede på at blive plukket. But the ones you mention have wider applicability, I think.
@Trond, skabet blev stillet i hjørnet og der blev det stående.
So I learned that ‘be sat’ is more Northern than not, and my intuitions about its pragmatics were not far off. Thanks all.
That’s ok, Ant. I don’t take it personally.
AntC: “was stood” suggests some sort of endurance/impatience or involuntary location. “I was stood at the bar all night because all the seats were taken.” … To put “standing” there would not carry the same attitude of the speaker to the situation.
See, for me it’s the “all night because all the seats were taken” that suggests endurance/impatience or involuntary location. Not the “stood”. And I get exactly the same amount of e/i & il from it with “standing”.
More evidence that there’s no e/i & il requirement can be found here https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/10/03/continuous-tenses/ :
It is 2pm and I am sat in my parents’ living room, talking to one of the cats.
Three hooded kids are stood around the corner drinking alcopops and it’s raining.
The OEC reveals that, while uncommon in US English, the usage isn’t completely unknown there, with around 340 examples (11% of the total):
My Mom and Alison were stood in the hallway watching me as I limped down the stairs.
It’s also found in Australian, Indian, Canadian, and New Zealand English:
Lonely, bored, excited people are sat at the bar.
(The OEC, by the way, is a stock of phrases they’ve dredged from the internet and won’t give access to because “it’s for researchers”.)
There’s a very interesting comment on that blog entry, to the effect that being stood can be a sort of stative or perfective, either because you are not actively choosing to keep standing there (even though you took up the position willingly), or because somebody else caused it and can’t choose not to. But it often shades into just a variant of the continuous sense, I think.
It also adds I was layed [sic] to the set. I was wondering what form that would take if it existed — I was taught lain as the ‘proper’ pptc of lie, but it seems that laid or even layed serves for both lie and lay now.
Back in 2014 I said:
However, antreiben is what a motor does with a vehicle.
Back to the future:
Er ist gegangen worden.
*lightbulb moment*
Instead of grammaticalizing it, we have lexicalized this in German, turning the content verbs into prefixes: stehenbleiben, liegenbleiben, sitzenbleiben (all separable, with initial stress). Ich blieb stehen means “I kept standing, I neither sat down nor walked away” or “I had been walking/running/driving but then stopped”, and I challenge anyone to describe these two meaning as the same aspect. “Stop!” is bleib stehen – “don’t walk away, no matter if you’ve already been doing that”. Ich blieb liegen means “I didn’t get up”, and ich blieb sitzen either likewise, or “I failed a year in school”.
I’ve read wohnen bleiben “to not move out”, but never heard or used it.
“To keep walking, to go on” is weitergehen (again separable, with initial stress), with an adverb as the prefix.
An important point.
David M.: Ich blieb stehen means “I kept standing, I neither sat down nor walked away” or “I had been walking/running/driving but then stopped”, and I challenge anyone to describe these two meaning as the same aspect.
Norw. jeg ble stående has the former meaning, not the latter.
“Stop!” is bleib stehen – “don’t walk away, no matter if you’ve already been doing that”.
Bli stående! “Stay (standing) were you are!”
Ich blieb liegen means “I didn’t get up”, and ich blieb sitzen either likewise, or “I failed a year in school”.
Jeg ble liggende til langt utpå ettermiddagen “I stayed in bed well into the afternoon”. Musikken var så bra at vi ble sittende i baren. “The music was so good that we didn’t leave the bar.”
I’ve read wohnen bleiben “to not move out”, but never heard or used it.
Norw. bli boende is the standard way of saying that. There’s also bli værende with a very general sense of “stay, not leave”. bli værende av hensyn til barna “stay for the sake of the children, Han ble tilbudt sluttpakke men valgte å bli værende “He was offered a redundancy package, but chose to stay”, Denne sommeren blir jeg værende hjemme! “This summer I’ll be staying home!”
A lot of stative verbs here. but it can be done with verbs of motion as well, turning them into descriptions of a state. Football commentator chargon: bli løpende imellom “(of a side) be running inbetween, not getting near the ball because of the other side’s technical skills”, bli gående og slenge “be left to walk about with no purpose”.
David M.: I challenge anyone to describe these two meaning as the same aspect.
I meant to add that the two aspects are inherent to the verb — as seen in the exchange between dainichi and me above. But maybe I’ll try a different take. The verb å bli isn’t so much an independent verb as the future aspect of the already wildly suppletive å være. It takes on an inchoative or a future durative meaning (or both, or shades inbetween) depending on context. The past tense, then, has the meaning of “became and/or continued to be”.
I don’t know about Norwegian, but in Danish blive can still be used in the older sense of ‘stay’. Norw. bli værende is just blive in Danish. But yes, it has some very bleached uses as a replacement for være in the passive, with perfectivity as the main feature — han var ramt af lammelse = ‘he was afflicted by paralysis’ is about a state, han blev ramt af lammelse is an event.
(The change from the ‘stay’ sense seems to have started in cases like ‘she was left a widow’ being understood as ‘she became a widow’).
This verb is a loan from Low German (with the tattle-tale prefix be-), but from the same root we natively have leve = ‘live’ (‘stick around’) and fientive levne = ‘leave’ (in its basic sense of not taking). PIE root sense is ‘adhere’: *leip-.
Discursus on varde: It is still sort-of-alive in Swedish, in the preterite vart at least — though it is widely mistaken for a variant of varit, the supine of vara = ‘to be’. I had a boss of rural extraction who would say things like där vart jeg snopen ~ “that made me surprised,” but otherwise it’s pretty much dead. (Swedish has a feature where the finite verb of the analytic passive can be left out in subordinate clauses: Inte hade jag gjort så om jag varit klokare. That makes varit look like a finite verb and I think that is what licenses the confusion with vart).
> The change from the ‘stay’ sense seems to have started in cases like ‘she was left a widow’ being understood as ‘she became a widow’
Ordbog over det danske sprog(1) agrees with you, but… isn’t it kind of a rare thing that a non-change (staying alive) constitutes a change (becoming a widow)? Doesn’t quite feel intuitive to me. I feel like there must be more to the story. Did it just take over from “vorde” or were there other options involved?
(1) https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=blive
Well, it agrees because that’s where I got it from ????
And actually in the widow case it is a change — the woman was not a widow before her husband died. A simpler case (in English) is “left alone” — you may not change your own state, but you only become alone when you are left. Also “stay behind” — somebody else needs to leave.
And as rare as the semantic change may be among languages, in Danish the gradual extension over the centuries is copiously attested as you can see in the ODS. I invite you to look up hvis which makes this one pale in comparison.
I understand it works for the widow case. My point is that the cases where it does work are so limited that it’s not intuitive to me how it spread from there, and it’s not obvious to me which ODS examples show the gradual extension.
Assuming you’re talking about the ‘hvis’ change from relative pronoun to conjunction, that is much more intuitive to me (‘take what you can’ > ‘take if you can’).
> you only become alone when you are left
Kind of tangential, but just yesterday I was reading a chapter in “The House at Pooh Corner” to my 4-year old, and there is a scene where everybody else leaves and “only Pooh was left”. He was clearly confused about whether Pooh had left or not, and I explained the important difference between “was left” and “had left”. I was about to go on to explain how SAE past participles can’t make up their mind whether they’re active or passive, but I stopped myself…
I’d never thought about telltale being another word for tattletale (which I think is only used as a noun meaning a person, usually a child, who tells an authority figure about someone else’s violation of the rules). As an American I wouldn’t use telltale as a noun, and of course I’d use telltale in the phrase I quoted.
Jack Vance was fond of using telltale to mean a tracking device. The OED lists quite a few “device or contrivance” senses, but not Vance’s.
telltale — that felt too sane and objective for my mood at the instant of writing. We are here to have fun, innit?
Yes indeed. And to distract me from the infernal noise outside as a town crew takes down a couple of trees.
Yes, Lars, no criticism intended.
None taken!
were stood
Is there any commonality with “were/are parked”?
“Where are you parked? I’m parked out the back.”
@Bathrobe, I don’t think so, because park is telic — you are not parking the car while it’s parked.
Even Tolkien wavered on the past participle of bestride. In The Fellowship of the Ring, first edition, he wrote: “Shadowfax they called him. … Never before had any man bestrode him, but I took him and I tamed him…” But in a BBC interview recorded in 1964, he had second thoughts:
The Ballantine paperback has “mounted” and so does the 50th anniversary edition; it makes me wonder if he tried changing “bestrode” to “bestridden” and decided that didn’t sound right either!
I’ll bet you’re right!
As an American I wouldn’t use telltale as a noun
When I was spending a few summers sailing on a lake in one- and two-person craft, I used telltale n. to mean ‘piece of ribbon or whatever that you tie to the mast to show which way the wind blows’. A similar device on land, however, is a windsock. Metal ones are (weather)vanes, but they tend to get stuck in one position, so I consider them obsolete; as a figurative term, weathervane may still be current.
Of course there is also the simple method of licking your finger and holding it up; the colder side shows the direction of the wind. You really don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows; the advantage of a telltale is that you don’t have to let go of the tiller or the main sheet (rope that controls the sail), just glance upwards.
(This also leads to the fact that an east wind is one that blows from the east, not toward the east. I don’t know if this is strictly anglophone or more general.)
the advantage of a telltale
is that it’s up the mast (on the shrouds and/or forestay) where it shows the direction of the wind hitting the sails. Whereas the wind at wavetop level where you hold your wet finger gets diverted by the waves, the boat’s superstructure, etc.
If you’re sailing at any speed across the wind, the angle of the (apparent) wind at deck level is 20-30 degrees different to that aloft. Which is why you want a twist in the sail. For that reason, racing sailors also put a carefully engineered burgee at the top of the mast.
A telltale is a piece of ribbon so different to a windsock — which has a tube/tunnel the wind blows through. A piece of ribbon nailed to a post on land is still a telltale.
I suppose so, but I have never seen a ribbon as a wind direction indicator on land.
Out on the water, it tends to be more consistently windy than on land. Thus windsocks for displaying wind direction on land tend to have large mouths and closed (or mostly closed) ends so they can collect and hold plenty of moving air even without a fresh breeze. The large socks are also designed to be seen at a fair distance, at places like uncontrolled general aviation airfields, where knowing wind direction is important.
That’s general – you have to dig into etymology to confirm that even Latin Auster is named for where he blows from, but he is.
I remember a very vivid picture book,* which had a two-page spread showing a ship being tossed by the four winds, each of which was represented by a different face in an outside corner, blowing on the vessel. Since childhood, that has always been my go-to mental image for remembering why the North Wind, say, blows from North, rather than in a northwards direction.
*?
Phantom footnote. Like phantom pain in an amputated limb. You think it’s there, but neither is.
Oh, I started to write a footnote, then realized I had almost certainly confused that book with another picture book that also featured personified wind. I deleted the footnote, but forgot to erase the asterisk. I may post story identification questions about one or both books of Stack Exchange, once I have them better disentangled in my mind since I did enjoy both of them.
I would not be surprised if the personification of the winds’ four quarters was old in Greek when (freiermordender) Ulysses was sung, and hence spread to all of Western culture. But what about other cultures? They can’t all have bearded dudes blowing on ships…
What did the pictures look like? I have seen maps with heads in the corners, but the heads tend to all look alike, at least to me.
Spanish is less ambiguous by default, since the usual expression is viento del [CARDINAL POINT], implying origin rather than destination.
The appositive form viento [CARDINAL POINT] exists, but it seems generally less common in CREA:
viento norte 16 — viento del norte 28
viento sur 37 — viento del sur 15
viento este 1 — viento del este 10
viento oeste 0 — viento del oeste 4
(The exception to the pattern is probably due to references to two book titles: La dama del viento sur and Días de viento sur. Why Auster in particular should be a literary favourite, that I do not know.)
Norw. nordavind etc. < norda “from north”.
(The ablative inflection in directional/locational adverbs is probably lost for most modern speakers.)
…oh, maybe that’s what the -en is doing on the German cardinal directions when they’re independent nouns (Norden, Süden, Osten, Westen) but drops e.g. in composition and derivation (Nordwind, nördlich…).
If my cosmology involved personifying the winds, I think I’d naturally associate them with where they’re from rather than where they’re heading, particularly since the practical question is what they’re bringing, not what they’re taking.
Are there non-western cultures where the rule doesn’t hold?
@John Cowan: The faces of the winds were clearly individual, although they had common features (some common due to the art style, some common due to their nature, like having really puffed out cheeks). One had a beard, for example, and their expressions were different. I remember wondering whether the four winds’ different faces were supposed to make them individually identifiable as north, east, south, and west, but I could not come up with a definitive assignment of each one to a particular direction.
Danish has nordenvind, søndenvind, vestenvind, østenvind, , with forms that only occur in those compounds. The independent forms are nord, syd, øst, vest.
(Other frozen forms occur in toponyms and farm names, like the ones that became very frequent family names: Nørregård, Søndergård, Vestergård, Østergård. I don’t know which case forms those represent).
Lars M.: Nørregård, Søndergård, Vestergård, Østergård. I don’t know which case forms those represent).
The comparative, surely.
Hmm. Wikt says < *h₁nŕ̥tros, so already a comparative, but then gives a PG comparative of that as *nurþrōzô; so maybe the protogermans forgot where *nurþraz came from.
Also the proper Danish for ‘south’ is claimed to be sønder and syd to be a German corruption. Same -n- as in E sun…
Wind blows from south, and wind blows from north,
daylight and shadow are siblings on earth.
Summer is short, and winter is long.
Dance to my ditty, cry to my song.
Trond, a propos of nothing in particular, do you know who wrote the song about the guy who tried to build his own mountain on the prairies somewhere? I thought it was called Crazy Ole, but it doesn’t seem to be…
Do you mean the sarcastic folksong about the failed colony Oleana, the project of the violin virtuoso Ole Bull*? There’s no building of mountains on the prairie in the original, but there may well be one in the English version.
* Initiator, main investor and chairman of an operating company — with a man named John F. Cowan as general manager.
Me: The comparative, surely.
There’s probably a lot more to it than that, but I’m not sure I’m able sort it out. Others may have a go while I’m thinking.
Required reading on the Germanic Compass Conspiracy and Germanic directionals and their largely fake cases (for real cases, see Hittite, also in that paper).
Thanks. Yes, both those papers were trying to resurface from the dark depths of my memory.
I was groping for a way to express that the forms sønder etc. are contrastive rather than comparative, but clearly connected to the (perhaps younger) comparative and superlative forms. The Norwegian map is full of contrasting names, not always contrasted with its opposition.
Sønstebø/Nørstebø
Instebø/Ystebø
Øvsttun/Nesttun
Øverleir/Nerleir
Synnerelva/Nordelva
Østerelva/Vesterelva
Østerøya/Vesterøya
Innerøya/Ytterøya
The regular comparative nordre etc. is rare in compounds, so I think the “contrastive” can be understood as a compound form of the comparative. It’s underlined by the fact that in Danish the formal comparative nørre takes it’s place among the contrastives sønder, øster and vester, likely because *norder fell together with the base form nord.
But this isn’t clearcut, and not all Scandinavian is the same. Da. and Sw. have forms like Da. vesterud, Sw. västerut “westward” (Norw. prefers vestover). Here we arguably see the contrastive “more west” without the definiteness of the comparative.
I meant to note that there doesn’t seem to be many toponyms made with norder- in Denmark, but there’s a good number of norder-/nørder- in Norway, although not as many as its contrast sønder-/synner-.
@Trond
Shetland has Norther Geo and Norther Trunie, this could bear out the idea that this was more prevalent in Norwegian names.
There are Sunderlands in Cumberland, Durham and Lancashire. Also a Sunderland, High in Selkirkshire, and the oddly named Sunderland, North in Northumberland, as well as a number of geographical feature names (some in other districts) Sunder-[X] [Y] where X is an element or elements and Y is the feature, e.g., the picturesquely named Sunderlandburn Foot, Roxburghshire.
This site allows a search with starting string, e.g., Sunder
https://gazetteer.org.uk/
Danish does have (what I assume are formally comparative) forms nordre, søndre, østre, vestre, øvre, nedre which are used in more recent toponyms, i.e,. streets and public builidngs. Old settlement names use over and neder for the latter two, and generally use the “contrastives” which is why you don’t see the comparatives on maps. (Also yderhavnen and inderhavnen in Copenhagen, but De ydre/indre Hebrider in Scotland. I had to stretch to find those, we don’t have a million fjords to place villages on).
(100m from where I’m sitting, Nordre Fasanvej continues into Søndre Fasanvej — late 19th century names. Østre Gasværk, Vestre Fængsel come to mind. Denmark is too flat for “new” upper and lower toponyms, but you could have Øvre Sal and Nedre Sal in a town hall or the like).
Anecdata: There used to be villages called Neder Ovre and Over Ovre just west of Copenhagen, in the sense of ‘downstream’ and ‘upstream.’ But the latter was too much of a tongue twister, so people started calling them Hvidovre and Rødovre after the colour of the churches; and so they remain to this day.
Unteroberndorf – twice even.
I’m not sure if the distinction between “contrastive” and “comparative” forms of cardigan directions was ever abaolutely clear, or if they’ve been overlapping in form as well as usage.
On a perhaps related note, while the superlatives nørst, sønst (and weak/definite nørste, sønste) are common in compound toponyms, the counterparts for east and west hardly exist — I guess the derivation was just too weird. One might think comparatives were used instead — and there does seem to be* more compound toponyms with vestre/øystre and variant spellings than with nordre>/i> and søndre.
* No thorough analysis, just using the search function at norgeskart.no. Caveats are recommended.
Cardigan directions.
Loose ends of the thread:
>JC: what to do when a cop stops you
>Trond: cardigan directions.
Jim Carrey, misapprehending the cop driving up alongside him shouting Pull Over! and replying No, it’s a cardigan but thanks for noticing.
Synthesis
Heh. Norwegian spellcheck and keyboard layout which I haven’t been able to change*. I’ve had to train it to accept just about every single English word, and still it slips.
* on my current phone. On my previous one I switched easily back and forth between a bunch of languages to get the characters I wanted.
Danish has punted on the superlatives, only nordligst, sydligst, østligst, vestligst are available. (If †sønderlig ever existed in that sense, it would be a homonym with sønderlig = ‘particular’). But øverst, nederst, inderst, yderst are the preferred words for those senses.
(Take-away for the rest of you: Danish and Oslo Norwegian may be dialects of the same language, but in lots of cases each prefers words that are highly marked or obsolete, but probably intelligible in the other).
Lars M.: Danish has punted on the superlatives, only nordligst, sydligst, østligst, vestligst are available.
I should clarify thar this is true also for contemporary Norwegian. The superlatives I quote are from old, homegrown toponyms — names of settlements and landscape features — and would be markedly dialectal or archaizing in any other context.
Denmark does not even have them in old village names any more. There is no reason why they can’t have existed and were reshaped later, (I don’t know when the fashion of naming secondary settlements after the primary one even started, it may have been too late for the superlatives to be usable. Earlier practice seems to have been names like Dalby when the breakaways built down the hill, or indeed Vestergård, probably reflecting that names were extremely local and there was only one valley for Dalby to be in and only one village for Vestergård to be west of. [One of my friends lives in Nørre Dalby]).
Morphological weirdness in wind names: Finnish keeps the underived pohja ‘north (n.)’ (in normal use only ‘bottom’) in pohjatuuli ‘north wind’, besides pohjoinen ‘north (n./a.)’. Same also in Pohjanmaa ‘Bothnia’ and Länsipohja ‘Västerbotten’, occasionally Peräpohja for the Bothnian part of modern Lapland region. In poetic use there’s also lounatuuli ‘south wind’ besides etelä ‘south (n.)’, lounas ‘southwest (n.)’ (but cf. Estonian edel ‘southwest’, lõuna ‘south’; same permutation found also in SE Finland). I don’t think any of this has anything to do with contrastive vs. comparative vs. superlative use though, just variation in degree of adjectival derivation.
Anecdata re marie-lucie long ago:
I once tried to elicit e hicieron from my Mexican friend, but got back y lo hicieron. According to her, the former is correct, the latter just sounds better.