Apparently, says my friend and fellow lacemaker Sue the Linguist, dove as the past tense of dive is a back-formation in American English. It sounds like something that ought to get one of those German style (Anglo-Saxon) vowel changing past tenses, so we made it have one. This even though it always used to be a regular verb until then. When that back formation takes over England, all hope will be lost! :)
Mind you, I can't think what other irregular verb the American past tense of dive is trying to copy. Weave/wove comes closest, though live/love is interesting to thing about.
Mind you
Katrina Worley wrote:
On Friday, July 18, 2003, at 06:47 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
No.8 "When shot, the dove dove into the bushes" doesn't apply in British
English. For us it is "When shot, the dove dived into the bushes" My knowledge
of the history of language is very slim and so I don't know if "dove" as past
term is the archaic form as "fall" is the archaic form of "autumn" for us.
Yep that's pretty much it... "the dove dived" sounds to my western US American ears much the same as "the leaf falled from the tree"- rather like the kind of error children make when first learning to speak. They learn the basic rules, but don't know when those rules shouldn't be applied. When I was taking linguistics (ended up taking three semesters of it- one for my BA in Anthropology, and two during grad school), we spent a lot of time looking at changes in verb form. In some parts of the US "dived" as the past tense of "dive" is probably accepted. It does sound odd to me, though.
Katrina [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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