snuck

Liz   Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:08 pm GMT
<<oh come on sweetie, I downloaded your accent a long time ago in my pc but i did not have time to login in on the forum at that time. Now I am asking about your accent. You sounded like British. My comments were like: : your voice is awesome and your accent is double awesome and Damian was in agreement with me. Stop playing games, let's get down to nitty-gritty stuff. Tell me something about your lovely accent. When I listened to it , the pictures of late Diana had conjured up in my head.>>

Thanks, that's flattering. :-) But I still don't understand how people can be fascinated by an accent that much. You don't even know me...I might as well be a horrible person despite my accent.

Where are you from, by the way?

We are getting off-topic, I'm afraid.
Guest   Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:16 pm GMT
Liz, I can bet my whole house on this fact that you cant be a horrible person. A horrible person will always have a stiff and harsh voice because of his or her personality syndrome. Your voice is soft and mellow so that negates such a notion, imho.

I am from somewhere on this planet, cant tell you my exact location. You can tell about your location, which accent you have and such info.

To answer your question:
<<<But I still don't understand how people can be fascinated by an accent that much. You don't even know me...I might as well be a horrible person despite my accent. >>

I said that I had a crush on your accent not you. Read my previous post once again. :)
Travis   Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:22 pm GMT
>>I definitely use 'snuck' more often than 'sneaked' (though I don't really use either that often). North American English as a whole tends to prefer strong verb conjugations in some cases where British English uses the weak verb. There's also "dive, dove" in NAE, but "dive, dived" in the UK; there's also some nonstandard ones like "climb,clumb". <<

I myself use both "dived" and "dove", using the former more frequently than the latter; the thing is that many of these things really cannot be stated in terms of NAE versus English English.

That said, my dialect seems more amenable to weak verbs than some other NAE dialects, which seem to use strong verbs more frequently. While I myself tend to at least preserve the more standard strong verb forms most of the time, some individuals here such as my SO seem to more frequently use weak verb forms in the place of strong verb forms, even for some verbs that one would expect to be strong in most English dialects (even though she does use some more nonstandard strong verb forms such as bring/brang/brung at times).

This does not seem to be a general trend towards regularization, though, as reductions of irregular weak preterites which make them only more irregular (usually through elision of a final /d/ or /t/) and some novel verb forms such as "-ghten" past participles being used in the place of "-ght" irregular weak past participles are common here.
Guest   Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:27 pm GMT
Travis, you are such a pain in the ass. Oh Doctor, Oh Doctor.. Her I come for your help. I cant stand the ennui that comes from reading Travis's posts. Oh Doctor, Oh Doctore....help me!
Josh Lalonde   Wed Apr 18, 2007 3:38 pm GMT
<<the thing is that many of these things really cannot be stated in terms of NAE versus English English. >>

You're right. What I meant to say was that Standard American English and related dialects are more likely to use the strong verb forms than Standard British English and related dialects.
I think my usage generally follows Standard American usage (dove, shrunken, gotten, pled). I don't tend to use any of the non-standard American forms though (clumb, boughten).
Travis   Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:23 pm GMT
>>I think my usage generally follows Standard American usage (dove, shrunken, gotten, pled). I don't tend to use any of the non-standard American forms though (clumb, boughten).<<

My usage seems to be just "less standard" from a GA perspective, as while I tend to often use weak forms for less common strong verbs (for instance, I use "pleaded" far more often than I use "pled"), I rather frequently use strong past participles with "-en" suffixes (generally related to adjectival forms which do have such affixes in most English dialects) where GA lacks such, and then I have things like "boughten"/"broughten"/"coughten"...
Kendra   Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:23 pm GMT
DOVE is still objected to.
In California it's DIVED, not DOVE.
Rene   Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:52 pm GMT
Hey Kendra,
Dove is objected to here in California, but I think a lot of people use it anyway. I catch myself doing it all the time (well not all the time since I don't go diving that often LOL). I think most of us only correct ourselves in writing on that word. As for boughten, I have a tendency to let that one slip every so often too, although I really try to put a check on it since it is considered wrong. Never heard the word coughten used by anybody though.