Would have went

[Glizdka]

I hear native speakers using went as the past participle of go quite often. Just how popular and close to being acceptable is it?

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"I would have went there if I were you."

 

[Rover_KE]

Unfortunately, it's fairly common in casual conversation, but totally unacceptable in standard English

 

[Glizdka]

On a similar note, I've heard broke used as a past participle (adjective) of break, too.

"Take the stairs; the elevator's broke."
"Can you lend me some money? I'm broke."

I think using broke is fine when talking about the lack of money, but I would use broken to mean the thing doesn't work. What do you think?

 

[GoesStation]

I think using broke is fine when talking about the lack of money ….

It's an adjective there and perfectly fine. Broken is also an adjective but it doesn't mean "insolvent".

 

[TheParser]

NOT A TEACHER


Hello, Glizdka:

1. Apparently, I used to use "went" as a past participle until my early twenties. (I may soon be 83 years old.)

a. One day at work, I said something like "Oh, he has already went home." My colleague instantly corrected me with "gone." I was astonished and embarrassed to learn that I had been using the wrong word for two decades.

2. When you get time, you might explore the Web to learn about how some (many?) Americans use "beaten" for a physical attack ("He was badly beaten by the mob") but "beat" for a defeat in sports or politics or even business: "After the election votes were tallied, we were shocked at how bad(ly) Mr. X was beat by Ms. Y" and "Come to our store for the best prices in town. We won't be beat by any competitor!"

 

[Glizdka]

1. Apparently, I used to use "went" as a past participle until my early twenties. (I may soon be 83 years old.)

a. One day at work, I said something like "Oh, he has already went home." My colleague instantly corrected me with "gone." I was astonished and embarrassed to learn that I had been using the wrong word for two decades.

Thanks for sharing the story. So, that's one of many "technically a mistake, but people don't care anyways" of this language.

2. When you get time, you might explore the Web to learn about how some (many?) Americans use "beaten" for a physical attack ("He was badly beaten by the mob") but "beat" for a defeat in sports or politics or even business: "After the election votes were tallied, we were shocked at how bad(ly) Mr. X was beat by Ms. Y" and "Come to our store for the best prices in town. We won't be beat by any competitor!"

I'm pretty sure I've heard beat for a physical attack, too.

 

[GoesStation]

Past participle use changes over time. The more we use a verb, the more likely it is to be irregular, and verb popularity fluctuates. Most Americans, I think, use snuck as the simple past and past participle of "sneak", but this is a pretty recent development. Dove for "dive" is also pretty new. Meanwhile, some verbs that used to have irregular past forms have lost them as they've become less common: if you read Mark Twain, you'll notice that his characters use durst as the simple past of dare.

Many Americans have switched from shrink/shrank/shrunk to shrink/shrunk/shrunk lately.

So it's not at all unusual to see some differences in people's use of these forms.

 

[jutfrank]

Here are two examples of typical usage from the South London dialect in which I was raised. They both come from the same broadcast of the popular UK football show Match of the Day, from the beginning of March last year:

Chris Hughton: Level of performance—good. Most people would have saw that today.

Ian Wright: He done what he had to do.

If I wasn't an English teacher obsessed with interesting language use, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid at this, but I just had to note it down.

 

[jutfrank]

If I weren't an old-fashioned pedant at times, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid at that.

;-)

Right—I'd just noticed that when reading back my own post! You know, I really do think it's because I was actually 'thinking' in my home dialect when writing it. Just invoking the very thought of Ian Wright seemed to have primed the switch in my language centre. I'm certain I wouldn't normally use was here in my professional life, or with members from outside my home dialect.

I always find it fascinating how I automatically switch my language depending on whom I talking to. Another noticeable feature of the London dialect I occasionally use with other members of my home speech community when I'm there (I haven't lived in London for many years) is was for the first person plural conjugation of the verb BE, as shown in another footballing cliché:

We was robbed!

 

[GoesStation]

Can you post some links to recordings of people speaking your native dialect?

 

[Phaedrus]

2. When you get time, you might explore the Web to learn about how some (many?) Americans use "beaten" for a physical attack ("He was badly beaten by the mob") but "beat" for a defeat in sports or politics or even business: "After the election votes were tallied, we were shocked at how bad(ly) Mr. X was beat by Ms. Y" and "Come to our store for the best prices in town. We won't be beat by any competitor!"

Another interesting case is the past participle of drink, namely, drunk, which is also, of course, an adjective meaning "intoxicated by alcohol." Because drunk moonlights as this adjective, many native speakers forget that it is also the past participle of drink, and will use drank as the past participle of drink.

Perhaps this is mainly an American tendency. I see no results on the British National Corpus (100 million words) for *have drank, but there are 61 results for *have drank (versus 157 for have drunk) on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1 billion words).

To confess, before I became enamored of grammar, I myself avoided drunk as the past participle of drink. I did not use drank instead, however. Somehow I managed to fabricate my own past participle: *drinken. I used it in the perfect and the passive. Apparently, *drinken did exist in Middle English.

 

[Glizdka]

To confess, before I became enamored of grammar, I myself avoided drunk as the past participle of drink. I did not use drank instead, however. Somehow I managed to fabricate my own past participle: *drinken. I used it in the perfect and the passive. Apparently, *drinken did exist in Middle English.

Wasn't -en a common past participle suffix in English, predating -ed? I remember one book I've read listed it in inflectional suffixes, under past participle. If so, it's perfectly understandable.

I, non-native speaker, sometimes instinctively go with slow-slowed-slown because slown matches other /-oʊ/, /-əʊ/ verbs (show-showed-shown, know-knew-known, grow-grew-grown). I sometimes do the same thing with flow-flowed-flown.

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Side question - when I use IPA for transcribing pronunciation, I'm supposed to enclose symbols within slashes. What if I also want a dash to signify it's a suffix? Is the dash also enclosed?

/-x/ or -/x/?