The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Baker, John <JMB at stradley.com> wrote:
> >
> >        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.
>
> 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.

A commenter on the Visual Thesaurus website recently expressed
discomfort with "texted". Dennis Baron's Web of Language piece on the
anniversary of the telephone was reposted there, and a commenter
wrote:

"On the other hand, the last sentence of your penultimate paragraph
may represent the first time I have seen 'texted' in print, and I am
not sure I have ever heard it used orally to express the past tense of
the verb 'text'. Though that construction may follow grammatical
convention, something about it sounds decidedly awkward, like a child
practicing the language and exploring the possibility that the past
tense of 'read' must be 'readed'."

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/1768/
(subscription req'd)


--Ben Zimmer

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