Getting drank

Beavertown Brewery currently have these billboard adverts up, with the slogan Out of this world beer. Drank on Earth: 

Photo: @nicholasd on instagram

The verb drink is one of our irregular verbs, as it doesn't have a past tense of drinked, adding the regular past tense ending -ed, and instead changes its vowel, so you say I drank beer not I drinked beer. It also does this for the participle, which is what you use for various things including perfect aspect (I have drunk beer) and passive (The beer was drunk by me). This passive participle is also the one we use for things like relative clauses (The beer that is drunk on Earth). 

But there is variation! Not everyone has all three of these forms in all contexts. For a lot of people, drank is used for all the non-present forms (I drank the beer, I have drank the beer), while for others, drunk is used (I drunk the beer, I have drunk the beer). For everyone, the adjective is drunk, though (no one says I am drank!), which I think is a nice indication that it's somehow separate from the verb. 

In formal English, then, this slogan would say Out of this world beer, drunk on Earth, because it's the relative clause type: this is short for which is drunk on Earth. They've chosen instead to go with the form used in more informal contexts and said Drank on Earth. The company's image is very informal and friendly, so they presumably felt it fit more with that vibe, and it has the added benefit of not being mistaken for the adjective which might imply getting drunk, not a good look from the point of view of the advertising standards people. 

yeet

You might have noticed that people yeet things now. It's a specific type of throwing. Here's a helpful hint I saw on twitter this week:

'Yoink' is the opposite of 'yeet'

Until as recently as January, I thought there was a regional difference in this word. The American Dialect Society had it as one of their Words of 2018, but with the meaning 'indication of surprise or excitement' - an exclamation. It was said to be onomatopoeic, the sound of yeeting something into a bin or whatever and 'pronounced with a celebratory gesture'. 

Urban dictionary seems to have only the exclamation in the older entries (though still accompanying the yeeting action of course). And as with so many new words, it may well come from black American pop culture, originating or possibly just finding new life in a dance. 

It may well have been onomatopoeic over here as well, but it was very definitely a verb of throwing, not an exclamation. What's more, because of its similarity to our Germanic-origin irregular verbs, it's got a past tense of yote and takes part in wordplay like yeeteth in the tweet above (see also twote for the past tense of tweet). 

I don't know if the two senses have always been available to everyone and it was just different bits of them got out into the mainstream, or if they've converged more recently. And I am FULLY aware of how painfully white and middle-aged and out of touch I sound just writing this post. 

The gender of Brexit

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this article about the gender of the word Brexit in various European languages. It notes that the word is masculine in French and German, but feminine in Italian. The Independent's version of the story points out that it's also masculine in Polish, Flemish, Catalan and Welsh.

Italian has a justification for making it feminine, in that the word it's based on, exit, is feminine when translated into Italian (uscita). This is a terrible justification, in my view, as it isn't the word uscita - it's the borrowed word exit, and there's no reason on earth why they should have the same gender. As someone in the comments noted, you can have two words for the same thing with different genders, and gives the example of das Auto (neuter) and der Wagen (masculine), both meaning 'car' in German. It's word that have genders, and exit is a different word from uscita. However, it's the Accademia della Crusca, Italy's language body, that has decreed this and they have fixed principles on the matter, so they must stick to them.

If a new word is similar to an existing one, then it'll tend to behave like that one. An invented verb like gling might have an irregular past tense glang, on analogy with sing. We might be tempted to pluralise POTUS (President of the United States) to POTI on analogy with other words ending in -us, like cactus.

If there isn't an easy parallel to draw, then I'd expect it to be masculine, as it is in the other languages mentioned. In Spanish and Italian, for instance, nouns end in -o or -a. This doesn't, so we have to just pick a gender. As the article says, most new words get masculine gender. This isn't, however, because 'Spain, being a Latin country, opts for male', as the Guardian lazily jokes. It's because whenever you have sets of things in grammar, there is a marked and an unmarked option. Consider number: we add something (usually -s in English) to show that a noun is plural, and without that, we assume it's singular. Singular is 'unmarked', plural is 'marked'. Consider positive and negative sentences: we have a word to show that the sentence is negative, but nothing to show that it's positive. Negative is 'unmarked', positive is 'unmarked'. The unmarked option is the default option.

When it comes to gender, masculine tends to be the unmarked option. If you have a group of friends in Spanish, then if they're all male, they're amigos. If they're all female, they're amigas. If they're mixed, then they're amigos (masculine). Now, whether this reflects a deeply sexist mindset, whether it has contributed over many generations to sexist thinking, or whether it's totally unrelated, probably remains an unsolved question. But it does mean that new words get masculine gender in most languages.

Welsh appears to be taking a very pragmatic approach to the matter: it's masculine because if it was feminine, it would have to have 'consonant mutation', which is when certain nouns change the sound they begin with under certain conditions. It's just easier to make it masculine.

I were saying I wa'

It's National Grammar Day! Sadly this isn't as fun as it sounds due to the idiots on the internet. However, here is a thing I have learnt. Jeremy Butterfield wrote an article about how linguists and other people have different ideas about what grammar is, and in the comments someone mentioned the famous(?) Dennis Skinner complaint about being misquoted as saying I were. It's mentioned at the bottom of this link.

As he says there, he's not saying I were, because that would be 'grammatically incorrect'. He's saying I wah, as in dropping the 's' from was, and it just happens to sound like I were. Someone from Yorkshire in the comments agreed with him:

This is fine, I suppose, except that I really want it to be I were. It's a nice symmetrical counterpart to the We was found in many other places. Both are examples of levelling of verb forms, and I  teach it as an example of how levelling is something that tends to happen, but that it's more or less chance what form is chosen in what dialect. If it's not levelling, then that means the the levelling only takes place in some dialects, and it's always towards was.

On the other hand, if it is a phonological reduction of I was, then there's other interesting questions to answer. Why don't these dialects level? Do other dialects actually have I were? If not, why would there be a preference to level towards was? How can we tell, for sure, that it's I wa and not I were?

Learnt vs learned

Mr T likes to get his grammar and spelling all correct when he writes facebook posts, so he checks things he's not sure about. Last night he suddenly realised he didn't know what the difference was between learnt and learned (as the past tense form of the verb learn). He googled it, and after a few dictionary entries, one of my posts was on the first page of hits. He was quite frankly astonished: of all the blogs in all the world, he had to google across mine.

I'm really pleased about that, but surprised. Does that mean that it's only me using the word learnt? I can't believe it's just me and the dictionaries. It looks like it's used more in the UK than in the US, which would explain a big lack of it on the internet. Still, there must be other British bloggers out there. For the record, either is completely acceptable and there is no preference for either in terms of formality or 'correctness'. I use learnt mostly just because that's what's in my idiolect. But if I were to justify it, well, I like it better. I like irregular verbs, I think they're pretty. And they often have something to reveal about language.

Steven Pinker, in his Words and Rules, notes the unusual fact that the 'default' (i.e. regular) plural suffix in German is -s, despite the fact that it's nowhere near the most common plural marker. He argues this on account of the fact that it's the suffix chosen for nonce words and proper names, which aren't normally pluralised. In English, although we spell our regular past tense suffixes -ed, there are actually three: /d/, /t/ and /ɪd/. I wonder if one could argue that the default one is /t/, based on the fact that it surfaces in such forms as learnt, dreamt and sent.

Furthermore, if we stopped using these irregular past tense forms, we'd lost interesting facts like this one: dreamt is the only word in English to end in the letter combination mt (apart from derived forms like daydreamt).