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Sofa_King
Joined: 03 Mar 2005
Location: South Korea
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 Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:24 am Post subject: Learnt vs. Learned |
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| Are the two interchangeable? If not, what's the difference? |
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jajdude
Joined: 18 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:34 am Post subject: |
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Does anyone used "learnt" anymore?
How about dreamed and dreamt?
Seems like dreamt is an unnecessary word as well. |
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Novernae
Joined: 02 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:46 am Post subject: |
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| jajdude wrote: |
Does anyone used "learnt" anymore?
How about dreamed and dreamt?
Seems like dreamt is an unnecessary word as well. |
I use dreamt but not learnt, but only in speaking. |
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Delirium's Brother
Joined: 08 May 2006
Location: Out in that field with Rumi, waiting for you to join us!
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:49 am Post subject: |
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| look here |
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Sleepy in Seoul
Joined: 15 May 2004
Location: Going in ever decreasing circles until I eventually disappear up my own fundament - in NZ
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:50 am Post subject: |
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| The past tense and past participle of the verbs learn, spoil, spell (only in the word-related sense), burn, dream, smell, spill, leap, and others, can be either irregular (learnt, spoilt, etc.) or regular (learned, spoiled, etc.). BrE allow both irregular and regular forms, but the irregular forms tend to be used more often by the British (especially by speakers using Received Pronunciation), and in some cases (learnt, smelt, leapt) there is still a strong tendency to use them; in other cases (for example, dreamed), in current British usage, the regular form is more common. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences
| jajdude wrote: |
Does anyone used "learnt" anymore?
How about dreamed and dreamt?
Seems like dreamt is an unnecessary word as well. |
It's only unnecessary if you plan to speak or write American or to use English badly. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 8:54 am Post subject: |
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"Learnt' is an older form, reflecting the history of 'learn' as an irregular verb. It is gradually being regularized, both in pronunciation and writing. We are in the middle of this process now for this and other irregular verbs; e.g., as a child in the 1960s, I was taught that the past tense of 'kneel' is 'knelt' and of 'plead', 'pled'. It bothers me to see 'kneeled' and 'pleaded' in common use today, but that's the way the language is going. My sense is that 'learnt' has held out better in British use than in American. Stephen Pinker discusses this process of regularization in his book, Words and Rules.
I checked at the Compleat Lexical Tutor (http://132.208.224.131/). In combined corpora of 4 million words, it found 37 occurrences of 'learnt', 117 of 'learned' (I didn't check to separate out the adjective 'learned' from the past tense verb form in this data). So, some people are still using 'learnt'.
Edited to make link active
Last edited by Woland on Wed Oct 18, 2006 6:01 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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CBP
Joined: 15 May 2006
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 10:24 am Post subject: |
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Woland, can you recommend any grammar links/websites that I can visit when I have questions? Do you have a website?
Knelt, learnt, etc. Definitely not in use in America. So I don't have to worry about when to use them or not. But my students will probably have had a British or otherwise non-American teacher at some point, so it's good to be aware of the differences. |
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Wangja
Joined: 17 May 2004
Location: Seoul, Yongsan
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Well, one can be learned but in the same context one can not be learnt. |
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matthews_world
Joined: 15 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Yikes! What's a corpora? A random selection of text? |
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some waygug-in
Joined: 25 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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I like this site for simple usage questions. Some of the errors in the list seem quite funny to me, others are things I have done and wasn't even aware of.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/index.html |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 5:51 pm Post subject: |
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| matthews_world wrote: |
| Yikes! What's a corpora? A random selection of text? |
Corpus - singular, corpora - plural 
A corpus is a collection of texts (either spoken or written). For the corpus to be fully useful, it needs to be tagged (have every word in it marked for lexical and grammatical properties) so that it can be searched effectively by computer. From a corpus, searching for a specific item, one can create a concordance, which shows the item in context (a certain number of words/characters to the right or left of the word). When searches are designed thoughtfully, one can learn a lot about the usage/syntax/semantics of different words.
Corpus-based linguistics has become a major movement in the field since the pioneering work of Douglas Biber in the 1980's. The major work he co-edited, The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, probably stands as the finest description of what English is like today. Others who have made major contributions include John Sinclair, former editor of the Collins CoBuild Dictionary and the books associated with it; the CoBuild was entirely corpus-based. For practical classroom applications, see the work of Tim Johns (google his name with the phrase, "data-driven learning" and it should lead you to his webpage.) There are many more.
There are also a number of corpora you can access on the internet, including those at The Compleat Lexical Tutor. One corpus not included there is MICASE (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), which is freely accessible to the public. Do a search for 'corpus' and 'concordancer' and a bunch fo things should turn up.
A few caveats. A corpus is only useful if you know what has gone into it and if that matches what you want to search. Looking for information about spoken English in a corpus of written texts (and most corpora are of written texts) would be foolish. Also, what you find will only be as good as your search items. And whatever you get as a concordance will still need to be interpreted, and that requires some level of expertise (but it's learnable with practice). Finally, there are things that a corpus search won't solve. John Swales has pointed out that the initial work in a lot of genre analysis involving the disccovery of larger structural patterns in texts still requires direct eyeballing of sample texts. Once initial structure is determined, then a properly tagged corpus can be used to fill in a lot of details.
I said 'corpora' above because Tom Cobb's website (The Compleat Lexical Tutor) allows you to search more than one corpus at a time and compiles the data for you. One nice thing about his page is that it lets you choose which corpora you'll search.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: Corpora generally aren't random, but are focused on particular types of language that researchers want to explore. |
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keithinkorea
Joined: 17 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 7:08 am Post subject: |
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| Wangja wrote: |
| Well, one can be learned but in the same context one can not be learnt. |
That is going to go over a few heads around here.
I find it funny when seppos come out with the whole superior American language BS, especially when many of them speak horrible English! Double negatives and all sorts of nastiness abound. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 7:53 am Post subject: |
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| keithinkorea wrote: |
| Wangja wrote: |
| Well, one can be learned but in the same context one can not be learnt. |
That is going to go over a few heads around here. |
I'm not sure about your reference here, but I'm the only person who addressed this issue other than Wangja, and it should be clear from what I said above that I recognize the difference.
| keithinkorea wrote: |
| I find it funny when seppos come out with the whole superior American language BS, especially when many of them speak horrible English! Double negatives and all sorts of nastiness abound. |
I'm not sure what this means. I haven't seen any claims to the superiority of American English in this thread. Double negatives are common in non-standard variants of both American and British English, but I haven't noticed any here. You seem to be aiming at strawmen. |
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keithinkorea
Joined: 17 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Thu Oct 19, 2006 9:42 am Post subject: |
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| Woland wrote: |
| keithinkorea wrote: |
| Wangja wrote: |
| Well, one can be learned but in the same context one can not be learnt. |
That is going to go over a few heads around here. |
I'm not sure about your reference here, but I'm the only person who addressed this issue other than Wangja, and it should be clear from what I said above that I recognize the difference.
| keithinkorea wrote: |
| I find it funny when seppos come out with the whole superior American language BS, especially when many of them speak horrible English! Double negatives and all sorts of nastiness abound. |
I'm not sure what this means. I haven't seen any claims to the superiority of American English in this thread. Double negatives are common in non-standard variants of both American and British English, but I haven't noticed any here. You seem to be aiming at strawmen. |
Double negatives are only used by uneducated idiots and they can be from anywhere.
The reason IMHO why intelligent British use the irregular versions of many verbs is due to the different meanings that can are garnered from a simple word, diacritic marks are too much of a pain to use. Language is not a science it is an art.
If I was writing a book I'd use diacritics otherwise I'll just use plain English |
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HamuHamu
Joined: 01 May 2003
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 3:55 am Post subject: |
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I have noticed in England that the tendancy is to use spelt, learnt, dreamt, etc., and rarely use spelled, learned, dreamed.
Also common in England is the use of the word "whilst" instead of "while." Same meaning, same usage, but it grates on me for some reason.
Then again, this is the same country where at least 75% of the population do not use WERE and WAS correctly - no offence to those who DO use them properly, but you have to admit it sounds awful: "We was havin ahr tea and you was bein naughty to ya bruvver..." or "Yes, I were dere! I saw 'im, I were dere when it appnd!"
Not saying that people in my own country do not make embarassing and horrible errors in written and spoken language - more just trying to make the point that these errors follow different trends in different locations and as a result I think we pick up on those of other places more easily. I pick up on the things that I find "wrong" about British English much easier because they really stand out to me. I am sure that English people would notice American English errors more easily for the same reason.
(Sorry to take that off topic......and I hope no one was offended by this, it wasn't meant offensively). |
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