The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

[Herb Stahlke]

John,

I found your pronunciation of the past tense of "text" surprising.
Morphologically you're treating "text" as a member of the cut/hurt
class of weak verbs that are invariant in their principal parts.  It
would be the only such verb ending in a consonant cluster, although it
does have the requisite final coronal.

Herb

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Baker, John <JMB at stradley.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
> Subject:      Re: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>        I too pronounced "striped" as a monosyllable.  Merriam-Webster,
> American Heritage, and Webster's New World all give both pronunciations
> but prefer the one favored by Neal and me.
>
>        I recently was surprised to hear my adult nephew and niece
> pronounce "texted" with two syllables.  I am forced to admit the logic
> of that pronunciation, since I pronounce "text" and "texted" as
> homophones, but it still sounds weird to me.
>
>
> John Baker
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
> Of Neal Whitman
> Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 9:46 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
>
> In my pile of unfinished posts there's one whose working title is "The
> Stupid Striped Shirt". I tell about sitting on a swing in the playground
> at preschool (which we called nursery school at the time), thinking
> about the striped shirt I had on, and wondering why my mom pronounced
> "striped" as [strajpId]. I pronounced it that way, too, just because
> that was the form I'd learned, but as I thought about it, I couldn't see
> any reason why the word shouldn't be pronounced as [strajpt], and
> decided that from then on, that's how I've pronounced it. Cognitive
> dissonance resolved! I was OK with [wIkId] for "wicked" and [crUkId] for
> "crooked" because they were monomorphemic to me, but "striped" was
> clearly "stripe" plus "ed".
>
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