2

Doing some historical corpus research right now and I am noticing the spelling convention in LModE of realizing the past tense with an apostrophe quite regularly, such as in walk'd rather than walked. I do not know when this first appeared or when it stopped. Do you know of any research mentioning this? Any help is appreciated.

Improve this question
3
  • 3
    If by “quite regularly” you mean ‘quite commonly’, then yes, it was; but it wasn’t really ‘regular’ (as in ‘adhering to a rule’), because spelling was so non-standardised that there were very few actual rules to adhere to. I wouldn’t say writing the past-tense morpheme as -’d instead of -ed has fully stopped even now – you still see it in poetry sometimes. But since there aren’t really two competing pronunciations anymore that we need to disambiguate between, it is of course much rarer now than it was when walked could be either one syllable or two, depending on speaker and context.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Mar 13 at 23:23
  • 1
    (But do remember that there are still a few cases where there are in fact still two forms, such as ‘A truly learned man has learn’d all he can’ or ‘He crook’d his crooked finger at her’. In these cases, the apostrophe would be useful even now, but the abandonment of the apostrophe in the general system has introduced ambiguity here by analogy.)
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Mar 13 at 23:26
  • I don't view that apostrophe as exactly a spelling convention, but rather an attempt to write the word in such a way that it would not be mispronounced in the reader's mind, if it had ended with -ed, with an extra syllable.
    – Daniel Asimov
    Commented Mar 15 at 1:23

0

Reset to default