Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedSteven Pinker: belief
2 Nov 2016 Conversations with Tyler Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason)
“One distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk; stink, stank, stunk; shrink, shrank, shrunk; where the shrank and the stank are giving way to their participle forms shrunk and stunk.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Steven Pinker
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 2 Nov 2016
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Chidden, right? Yes, chidden, or holp as the past tense of help. Some of them survive in dialects, in Appalachia, in remote parts of the British Isles; forms that were in use a couple of hundred years ago may have resisted the erosion for reasons that are completely obscure, partly capricious. One distinction that is vanishing that I think is sad is the three-way distinction in verbs like sink, sank, sunk; stink, stank, stunk; shrink, shrank, shrunk; where the shrank and the stank are giving way to their participle forms shrunk and stunk. No shrank and stank.…
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