Drank vs Drunk

WINE TALK
21

Mouse, mice. House, hice?

22

There was a funny line in Cheers where someone remarks that flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, and Woody says “boy, I learned that the hard way.”

23

The most common screw up has to be fewer v. less. I had to laugh when Mercedes screwed the pooch in their recent series of commercials. Come on!

24

Television “reporters” are routinely guilty of this. OTOH, my local supermarket now has the Express Lanes marked “12 items or fewer”, and I say it’s about f**kin’ time. [berserker.gif]

25

An Ode to the English Plural

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and there would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

26

golf clap

27

I think the last “Ode” I read was on a Grecian urn. It wasn’t nearly this entertaining and Keats is jealous.

28

“less/fewer” drives me nuts.

I also hate when people use “hung” for the past tense of hanging as capital punishment. It’s “hanged”, as in “he was hanged”, not hung. Well, maybe he hung, but that’s a different question.

29

While we’re at it (and I hope this is not thread drift), what is the plural of

Barolo

Barbaresco

Brunello

Cheers,
Doug

30

Or, perhaps he really was hung. Like a horse. newhere

31

They shoot horses, don’t they? newhere

32

I thought I had managed to pack enough mistakes in a single sentence to make that clear!

33

If you are speaking or writing in English, these are:

Barolos

Barbarescos

Brunellos

34

ummm, a most enjoyable evening? [drinkers.gif]

35

Vastolae

36

But in Italian: Baroli, Barbareschi (because a C followed by an I would be pronounced like CH in English) and Brunelli.

37

Basically, English is recovering from its ancient German roots, still slowly regularizing the past tense 1,500 years after the Angles, Saxons and Jutes landed in Britain. I think you’ll find that all of our irregular past tenses are Anglo-Saxon (i.e., German) in origin.

Drink is one of those: In German, it’s trinken but, as in English, the vowel shifts to the back of the mouth for the past participle, getrunken (drunk).

The regularization process if much further along in North America than in the UK, where burnt, learnt, dreamt and other irregular forms are still very common if not the norm. Part of this is due to the fact that Americans tend to pronounce a T in the middle or at the end of a word (i.e., after a vowel) as D (e.g., water as waw-der). Thus out of the mouth of an American burnt and learnt sound pretty much like the regularized forms burned and learned, while British speakers still have a crisp T. Americans would have no reason to use the irregular spelling, then, since it wouldn’t reflect our pronunciation.

38

That’s the best simple answer.

There are some twists in your original examples, though, John:

“I drank x” is appropriate. “I have drunk this” and “this wine was drunken” may also be appropriate, but it starts to get a little fuzzy for me here. “the wines drank” seems wrong, unless it’s “wines that we drank”. “Wines that were drunk” seems the appropriate thing, to me, but what do I know.

“This wine was drunken” is not correct. I take it that the real subject is omitted but implicit (e.g., This wine was drunk by the experts). If that’s the case, then it looks like a passive construction with an auxiliary verb was, so it needs the past participle drunk.

Drunken is an adjective, not a verb, meaning enebriated, but since there are past participles for other irregular verbs that end in -en (e.g, beaten and eaten) and past participles can function as adjectives, it’s not hard to see how people get confused about it.

I take it you mean “the wines drank” in the sense of the wines that were drunk that night where this is a noun phrase. If so, it’s not right. You could say The wines we drank that night (drank because there’s no auxiliary verb) or The wines that were drunk that night or The wines drunk that night (with the past perfect and an auxiliary verb omitted but implied in the latter).

On the other hand, among us wine geeks, The wines drank might be grammatical in the phrase The wines drank well, meaning they showed well or tasted good.

But geeks of all types make a hash out of the language.

39

Ken, John,

It is good to have the option!

Is the “ch” in barbareschi pronounced like sh as in share, ch as in cha-cha, or sk as in sky?

Tim,

I agree, that would a most pleasant way to spend some time doing a little research.

Cheers,
Doug

40

For a persuasive agrgument that Germanic speakers had less influence on English grammar than given credit for, and Celtic speakers more, I recommend the highly-readable Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter - http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/our-magnificent-bastard-tongue-john-mcwhorter/1100554067

A review: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/books/review/Shea-t.html