3 ms·

No it's not, or more correctly, that is a rather recent development. The Middle English account of a man punished given on Wikipedia uses hung (http://en.wikipe

by Jun8 15y ago

No it's not, or more correctly, that is a rather recent development. The Middle English account of a man punished given on Wikipedia uses hung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered), in fact this punishment was referred to as "hung, drawn, and quartered". Now, if that is the case, how to explain the title of the Wikipedia entry, i.e. the usage of hanged in place of hung. This is the common phenomenon of regularization of irregular verbs, that has been going a loong time in English, eventually almost all of them will be regularized. This article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486935/How-irregular-verb-drived-extinction.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486935/How-irregular...) gives some details and explains that there are about 98 irregular verbs left in the language, compared to 177 in Old English. You can see this process today in the "driven-drove" dichotomy, different people choose one or the other. Eventually drove will disappear.

FreakLegion 15y ago
It's a little more subtle than that. There are usage differences between the perfect and imperfect tenses in both "hung-hanged" and "driven-drove," between active and passive constructions[1], etc. Unfortunately, most native speakers aren't any more savvy to this than they are to what remains of the English subjunctive. 1. It will always be "I drove to the store" and "I was driven to the store" and "I am a driven person," never "I driven to the store" or "I was drove to the store" or "I am a drove person."
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Not only that, but neither "driven" nor "drove" is a regular past-tense form. That would be "drived", a use I haven't heard from anyone over two years of age.
  - FreakLegion 15y ago
    Yes and no. Some people call ablaut verbs irregular, but almost all of them are in fact regular. They only seem irregular because there are relatively few of them left to group together [1]. But I'm not aware of any language with a single pattern of conjugation. Many have 10 or more. 1. Ex.: Drive-drove-driven, write-wrote-written, ride-rode-ridden, etc. While they follow a different conjugation pattern, most ablaut verbs are perfectly regular.

by Jun8 15y ago

FreakLegion 15y ago

It's a little more subtle than that. There are usage differences between the perfect and imperfect tenses in both "hung-hanged" and "driven-drove," between active and passive constructions[1], etc. Unfortunately, most native speakers aren't any more savvy to this than they are to what remains of the English subjunctive. 1. It will always be "I drove to the store" and "I was driven to the store" and "I am a driven person," never "I driven to the store" or "I was drove to the store" or "I am a drove person."

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Not only that, but neither "driven" nor "drove" is a regular past-tense form. That would be "drived", a use I haven't heard from anyone over two years of age.
- FreakLegion 15y ago
  Yes and no. Some people call ablaut verbs irregular, but almost all of them are in fact regular. They only seem irregular because there are relatively few of them left to group together [1]. But I'm not aware of any language with a single pattern of conjugation. Many have 10 or more. 1. Ex.: Drive-drove-driven, write-wrote-written, ride-rode-ridden, etc. While they follow a different conjugation pattern, most ablaut verbs are perfectly regular.