"Crawlen"?
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A.A. wrote:
In the recent Christmas movie "Jingle Smells", a character says "[if I had experienced what you did] I would have crawlen into a bottle too". Is this usage of the form crawlen grammatical in English? Perhaps a dialect thing? Because to my ear it sounds valid, but others have said that to them it sounds like a mistake.
The issue is whether crawl is (optionally) in the class of English "strong verbs" that form past participles in -en, e.g. beaten, eaten, fallen, forgiven, forsaken, given, proven, shaken, taken, …
For me, the past participle of crawl is the regular weak-verb form "crawled", which is also what I find in all the dictionaries I've checked. And a web search for "would have crawlen" comes up empty at the moment, though I suppose Google will find this post after a while.
A.A. sent a link to a clip included in a Jingle Smells take-down posted on YouTube a few days ago, "New Worst Movie Ever Made Has Dropped!". Here's the audio for the sentence in question (from about 9:05):
I mean I only saw it on TV and I probably would have crawlen into a bottle too if I didn't have Lisa.
[The missing last syllable of "Lisa" is an editing error due to the reviewer, who complains about many things in his 23-minute pan, but doesn't mention the idiosyncratic past participle in this clip…]
Apparently the actor John Schneider (and/or the show's writers) feel that "crawlen" is the past participle of "crawled", or at least thought that the character Dusty Gutman would talk that way; and my correspondent A.A. also reports finding it valid.
There's certainly precedent for irregularization of weak verbs. But it seems odd that "crawlen" is apparently not documented anywhere else.
Philip Taylor said,
December 31, 2023 @ 8:19 am
Your web search throws up two hits for me :
but removing "would" from the search string (leaving just "have crawlen") throws up far more. I can certainly imagine myself saying "have crawlen" although I would never use it in writing.
Lukas said,
December 31, 2023 @ 8:24 am
As a German speaker I at first thought you were referring to how a German would use the english word "to crawl".
"Man kann das Internet nach Daten crawlen" -> "you can crawl the internet for data"
Mark Liberman said,
December 31, 2023 @ 8:53 am
@Philip Taylor: "Your web search throws up two hits for me "
I see those hits now, following a link to this post and another one about Britney Spears:
When I searched before, all I got was the "keep fishing" image
…so I guess finding this post motivated Google to keep looking? Who knows what we'll see in a few hours…
Coby said,
December 31, 2023 @ 9:18 am
Your handout includes prove -> proven, but not plead -> pled. I believe that these are the only French-derived verbs that have been irregularized, and I wonder if it's a coincidence that both are used by lawyers.
Ed Rorie said,
December 31, 2023 @ 9:32 am
Where I come from, “crawlen” is how they pronounce the present participle of “crawl."
NSBK said,
December 31, 2023 @ 10:47 am
In my idiolect I have "crawl" as a weak verb but I could see "crawl" –> "crawlen" being modelled after "fall" –> "fallen". I have the same "a" vowel for both, so they're exact rhymes, maybe that could play a role?
On the other hand, I'd find "crell" as the simple past to be very unlikely, even given "fell". Unless we go all in and modify the spelling, i.e. crall, crell, crallen…
jhh said,
December 31, 2023 @ 10:49 am
Ed Rorie: Where's that that you come from? :)
Matt Sayler said,
December 31, 2023 @ 11:19 am
@Cody: "Your handout includes prove -> proven, but not plead -> pled. I believe that these are the only French-derived verbs that have been irregularized, and I wonder if it's a coincidence that both are used by lawyers."
I have been informed by (primarily American) legal academics that "pleaded" is strongly preferred over "pled." I suppose the irregular version sounds more historical/legal register to me. Some ink has been spilled over this, of course…
Matt Sayler said,
December 31, 2023 @ 11:20 am
(apologies @Coby not @Cody)
Ralph J Hickok said,
December 31, 2023 @ 11:41 am
I certainly heard it a lot and probably said it, too, as a kid growing up in Northeastern Wisconsin in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
It sounds perfectly natural to me but it looks strange written out. I don't think I've ever seen it in writing before.
Ed Rorie said,
December 31, 2023 @ 12:06 pm
jhh: In the US nobody doesn’t g-drop except dignified news anchors and mid-Atlantic patricians (both of which seem to be endangered species).
Philip Anderson said,
December 31, 2023 @ 12:13 pm
@Coby
Not only are “pled” and “proven” legal terms, both are particularly Scottish. The former form has died out in the rest of Britain, but was taken to the US, while the latter originated in Scotland, and has been adopted elsewhere, with a narrow, legal sense.
DCBob said,
December 31, 2023 @ 2:52 pm
This brings to mind the German Society for the Strengthening of Verbs ("Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben"), whose goal is to create a new Germanic language, Neutsch, by making every verb is strong/irregular.
As John Prine sang, "Memories, they can't be boughten; they can't be won at carnivals for free."
RfP said,
December 31, 2023 @ 7:35 pm
A 20-ish housemate of mine in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early Seventies (native speaker of Finnish descent) used to joke with us about how weird it would be for someone to use anything but “drinken” in a sentence like this: “I haven’t drinken any milk today.”
“Drunk and drunken both sound too weird,” he’d say.
That made a lot of sense to me. (Even if I’d never say “drinken” mysen—err, “myself,” that is.)
I believe Chuck Fillmore was of also of Nordic ancestry (in his case, Scandinavian, IIRC), and he told our Linguistics 20 class way back when that when he was growing up (in Minnesota?) he was corrected when he would “drop the g” at the end of a participle. So he started to correct his pronunciation of the numbers that come after eleven and twelve to “thirting, fourting, fifting…”
Could this be a regional thing for areas with lots of Scandinavian and Finnish immigrants?
Joe said,
December 31, 2023 @ 7:47 pm
Do we know that's how it was written in the script? I wonder if it's possible the actor substituted his own dialect (or his character's) and the director let it through. Or if he simply stumbled in his delivery (the very next syllable is also "in") and the director let it through. This film is a trashy seasonal cash grab with a 3.4 out of 10 on IMDB so I'm not sure we can assume everything in the final cut is a precisely chiseled artwork left as a legacy for future generations.
Don P. said,
December 31, 2023 @ 7:59 pm
Always reminded of this exchange from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Ford: Teleportation is unpleasantly like being drunk.
Arthur: What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
Ford: Ask a glass of water.
RfP said,
December 31, 2023 @ 8:25 pm
P.S. to my Chuck Fillmore anecdote: when he “dropped his g,” the resulting final syllable would have a long E. For example, “thinking” would become “thinkeen.”
So, conversely, “thirteen” would become “thirteeng.”
/df said,
December 31, 2023 @ 10:22 pm
"pled" may be a a legal form but I think "pleaded" is what normal people say, even in "the defendant pleaded guilty" .
Surely "proven" is nowadays normally treated as an adjectival form rather than a part of a verb: "a proven methodology" but "the methodology was proved to be effective".
Brett said,
December 31, 2023 @ 11:48 pm
@Ed Rorie: I am neither a news anchors, nor a mid-Atlantic patrician, but my natural American accent (developed first in the upper Midwest, then on the Pacific coast) has no g-dropping at all. That is not to say that many people I grew up with did not have a degree of g-dropping, but my accent, when it is remarked upon at all, is considered a pretty generic educated American accent.
@/df: I (who am not a lawyer) use pled as the default past and past participle. Again, there is certainly a cohort that does not use those strong forms, but pled seems unremarkable to virtually all my interlocutors.
In the meantime, Happy New Year, everyone!
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 1, 2024 @ 11:34 am
Western Pennsylvania lawyer here for another data point on the scatterplot — you'll rarely see "pleaded" (in civil and Orphans' court, at least); it's always "pled". I wonder if it's the Scotch influence?
J.W. Brewer said,
January 1, 2024 @ 11:34 am
The story seems to be that "crawl" crawled into the English lexicon circa A.D. 1200 without a known Old English predecessor, possibly as a loanword from Old Norse, although several Old Norse references I consulted lack the alleged ON etymon, maybe because it is not attested in the extant ON corpus but plausibly reconstructed from more recent North Gmc. languages?
The Danish descendent of the supposed ON etymon is a weak verb in modern Danish, which I guess suggests even if it doesn't prove that the ON verb that may have washed up in medieval England was a weak verb in ON.
As noted above, it is extremely rare for Romance-origin loanwords to become strong verbs in English, even though there are instances of historical weak verbs "strengthening." This raises in my mind the interesting question of whether post-1066 borrowed verbs from other Germanic languages (Old Norse, early Dutch or Low German, whatever …) were borrowed with their full "strong" principal parts if strong verbs in the source language, or whether English tended to borrow only the simple present/infinitive form and then make them, in English, weak verbs by the usual pattern.
Philip Taylor said,
January 1, 2024 @ 11:52 am
Benjamin — " I wonder if it's the Scotch influence ?" — More likely the Scottish influence; if it were the Scotch influence, I would expect a similar effect amongst those who drink Bourbon, Rye, etc.
Philip Taylor said,
January 1, 2024 @ 11:53 am
Oops, missing </b> after the second "Scotch" …
J.W. Brewer said,
January 1, 2024 @ 2:01 pm
@Benjamin Orsatti: A fairly modest-cost corpus linguistics project could be a statistically rigorous survey of the ratio of "pleaded" versus "pled" in Westlaw-accumulated legal documents (both judicial opinions and parties' briefs etc.) to see if there are meaningful state-to-state or regional variations within the U.S.
@Philip Taylor: The prescriptive distinction among different Scotland-related adjectives on which you insist had not yet emerged on either side of the Atlantic by 1776, when we Americans rebelled against the arbitrary rule of London-based authorities. Or Edinburgh-based authorities, for that matter. You do not speak our language (much less the Western Pennsylvania variety of it, which I don't speak myself although some of my late uncles did), and we do not recognize your authority.
/df said,
January 1, 2024 @ 4:19 pm
FWIW, a default G Ngram plot of pleaded vs pled shows a slow decrease from ~50:1 (pleaded:pled) in the early 19th C to ~5:1 ca. 1990 and then increasing to ~14:1 over the last decade. Legal corpora in various jurisdictions might give different results.
RfP said,
January 1, 2024 @ 7:29 pm
@J.W. Brewer:
Being neither an authority, nor based in either London or Edinburgh, this particular Californian of Scottish heritage is, nonetheless, particularly grateful to Philip Taylor for articulating the basic form of adjectival correctness—let alone politeness—that accords with English-language references to all but a few of the things associated with that land.
Conjugations matter.
Declensions matter.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Thank you, Philip!
J.W. Brewer said,
January 1, 2024 @ 8:25 pm
@RfP: I respectfully refer you to the entry on "Scotch, Scottish, Scots" in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1989 edition is what I have at hand), discussing the trans-Atlantic divergence and noting that as of that date (things may have shifted a bit in subsequent decades) the post-19th-century Scottish taboo against "Scotch" had, for perfectly straightforward historical reasons, not been widely adopted in North American usage.
As an American of partially-Scotch/Scottish/whatever heritage, I do not feel any politeness-based obligation (in an American discourse context) to defer to the lexical preferences of those whose privileged and/or lazy ancestors stayed in Scotland rather than emigrating in prior centuries. As far as I can tell from the mass media, they're pretty much all heroin addicts living on the dole and eating deep-fried Mars bars, anyways. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Mr. Orsatti, as a free-born Pittsburgher, may write as he pleases without yinz hassling him.
RfP said,
January 2, 2024 @ 12:56 am
@J.W. Brewer:
Much as I respect and rely on MWDEU (in my case, the 1994 edition), the relevant section of this entry really sounds dated to me. In fact, given the ever more integrated, quasi-global culture of our 21st-century world, it strikes me as positively insular.
But the last sentence of the 1994 entry might not have appeared in the 1989 edition. The part that states:
This sounds eminently reasonable to me. Especially today.
ktschwarz said,
January 2, 2024 @ 3:59 am
The American Heritage Dictionary (usage note) and Garner's Modern American Usage both advise against "Scotch" referring to people; Garner goes further, discouraging any use except in fixed phrases such as "Scotch broth" and wrt whiskey. (Garner has been rebranded from "American" to "English" in the last couple of editions in a bid for a wider market, but it's still American-centric.)
Granted, those sources could be categorized as virtue-signaling, or as narrowly applicable to national-audience media and not intended for beating up on conversational use by Western Pennsylvanians, who live in one of the centers of Scots-Irish immigration and can call themselves what they like. But MWDEU does appear to be outdated in stating that "In North America Scotch is the prevailing adjective"; it was written before there were Google ngrams, which show "Scotch" in a gradual decline since about 1900 in the American corpus, falling below "Scottish" by about 1940 — and that's without subtracting out the fixed phrases, whiskey, and tape. The newcomer "Scots-Irish" hadn't yet surpassed "Scotch-Irish" in that corpus as of 2019, but it was getting close.
yonray said,
January 2, 2024 @ 7:03 am
@ktschwarz: don't forget the eggs (or don't you eat them across the pond?)
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 2, 2024 @ 8:00 am
At the risk of having my home torched later by a horde of angry naked blue men, "Scotch" and "Scottish" aren't semantically coextensive to my ear. Craig Ferguson is "Scottish". Andrew Carnegie was "Scotch".
J.W. Brewer said,
January 2, 2024 @ 8:50 am
No native speaker of American English needs to take advice from snooty busybodies like Garner. As to the MWDEU "rule of thumb" (which by its own possibly-dated-even-then account did not explain the actual facts of North American usage), we apparently need to decide whether "influence" is a "people" or a "thing." Which does not strike me as a particularly coherent question.
In any event, I certainly agree with ktschwarz that "Scotch" has been notably fading over time in North American usage outside the fixed phrases. This may be one of those instances, however, in which the google n-gram trendlines are not entirely reliable in showing the timeline because the corpus overweights copy-edited prose reflecting prescriptive stylebook advice and underweights informal/vernacular texts.
I would probably have said "Scottish influence" myself, but reject the notion that Mr. Orsatti is in error for using a fading-in-market-share variant of long standing. And indeed, given his temporal distinction offered in his most recent comment, "Scotch" makes perfect sense because the "influence" in question is the legacy of early (let's say predominantly pre-1850) settlement patterns – by the time Pgh's population was filling up with Croats and Ruthenians and etc. etc. coming to work in the steel mills, Scots were no longer particularly numerous among new arrivals.
RfP said,
January 2, 2024 @ 7:51 pm
(I have divided this post into three sections, in hopes it will be easier for people to digest.)
Part 1
As far as I can tell, the questions brought up in the discussion of "Scotch, Scottish, Scots” involve a complicated set of relationships.
The original misunderstandings seem to revolve around boundaries, gray areas, and edge cases in the realms of register, informality, dialect, and historical usages—and in the relationship between utterances that are standard in one context while being non-standard or even downright offensive in another. And all of these components, taken together, have given rise to a discussion that involves—whether or not it’s been put that way—more general issues of pragmatics.
In both of the original posts, the lack of context that would be relevant for a speech community that is broader than that of the authors has given rise to yet another example of how we are “divided by a common language.”
I will try to cover the main points of what I see as a more optimal context for each of these initial posts (and I really hope I got the HTML right—including the slight correction to Philip Taylor’s post, which I have done so that people will have an easier time keeping track of the conversation):
RfP said,
January 2, 2024 @ 7:51 pm
Part 2
Benjamin E. Orsatti
The use of “Scotch” in Benjamin E. Orsatti’s post derives from the possible historical influence of Scottish immigrants in the area of Western Pennsylvania in terms of the customary usages in legal English (because lots of them were lawyers, I guess?) in not only that area, but perhaps even more broadly in U.S. legal parlance; it’s also employed here because the predominance of Scottish immigration in that area has resulted in a local legacy of the common use of the term “Scotch” to refer to both people and things who—especially locally, I guess—are related to Scotland.
For Benjamin’s local speech community, the use of “Scotch” is not only unremarkable, but confers an extra layer of historical accuracy and relevance.
Philip Taylor
RfP said,
January 2, 2024 @ 7:52 pm
Part 3
Philip Taylor, on the other hand, is not only writing from within a BrE context—which makes a pretty hard and fast distinction, at least in formal speech, between the use of “Scottish” and “Scotch”—but from within the original language area of BrE, in which there is even to this day a certain amount of contention between “the English” and “the Scottish,” especially in the wake of recent referenda of various sorts.
As we have seen, there are marked differences in how the Scottish/Scotch distinction has been dealt with in BrE and AmE. This distinction, of which Philip was seemingly unaware, led him to regard the use of “Scotch” in Benjamin’s post as a faux pas—and a humorous one, to boot.
I hope this additional context gives people food for thought about the following questions:
From the standpoint of pragmatics, what do we, as readers and posters, expect (reasonably or otherwise) from a comment to Language Log?
How much should one take into account the varied linguistic backgrounds—both in the sense of the science of linguistics and in the sense of familiarity and facility with the use of the English language—of one’s readers at LL?
Philip Anderson said,
January 3, 2024 @ 3:21 pm
@RfP
You quoted some guidance for “an American who does not want to offend”; it seems clear to me that J.W. Brewer does not fall into that category, and probably considers it his right, if not duty, to end. I doubt if I have offended him by saying this.
I have noticed from a number of posts that England and America are still divided by a common language, and Americans, and others, get annoyed if “corrected”, or even if a difference is simply pointed out. As a discussion forum, correction is probably inappropriate, whether a typo or grammar, but as a language forum, language differences are of interest.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 3, 2024 @ 4:33 pm
RfP said,
"From the standpoint of pragmatics, what do we, as readers and posters, expect (reasonably or otherwise) from a comment to Language Log?" — More or less the following:
Post: [INTERESTING LANGUAGE THING WITH JUST THE RIGHT MIX OF LINGUISTICS JARGON TO MAKE ME FEEL LIKE I'M PEEKING INTO THE PROFESSOR'S LOUNGE AND STUFF I CAN UNDERSTAND]
Comment: [LAY EXAMPLE OF INTERESTING LANGUAGE THING OR EXTENSION OF ORIGINAL LAGUAGE THING TO OTHER LANGUAGE THING]
Comment: [QUESTIONS ONE OR MORE ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING CONCLUSION ESSENTIAL TO INTERESTING LANGUAGE THING]
Comment: "Hey, in discussing [INTERESTING LANGUAGE THING P] you just did [INTERESTING LANGUAGE THING Q]; isn't that interesting?"
Comment: "Nah, that's not interesting; that's commonplace; what you people do to sandwiches with Cheeze Wiz is 'interesting'."
…
J.W. Brewer said,
January 4, 2024 @ 7:46 am
The trick is the rhetorical skill to point out an interesting difference without being taken to be "correcting" it. And of course the nature of internet comment threads is such that people not infrequently make errors as well as display regional/dialect variations: it's easy for typos, thinkos, and editing glitches to go undetected before the "submit" button is clicked. But IMHO it's usually better to pass over apparent errors in silence rather than drawing attention to them unless it is highly likely that pointing them out will improve the quality of the subsequent discourse. Even then, you can do it conditionally-and-thus-politely. E.g. "That 1839 date you gave for that quotation exemplifying the usage under discussion seems implausible to me. Did you mean to type 1939 or am I missing something?"
So now I am curious about Benjamin Orsatti's choice of orthography for "Cheeze Wiz." The *official* trademarked name of the product that appears on the packaging is "Cheez Whiz," but it is pretty common (esp. in Southeastern Pennsylvania where the product has greater-than-average cultural salience) for the second half to be spelled in informal discourse as "Wiz" or "wiz," and not unusual for that to be used as a clipped form with the first word omitted. "Cheeze" for "Cheez" strikes me as less common, although googling suggests it's Out There. But I don't know if that was a slip of the fingers by Mr. Orsatti or a deliberate choice of a variant spelling and if the latter whether an idiolect thing or a recognized Pittsburghism. (Probably not due to Scotch influence, though …)
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 4, 2024 @ 8:55 am
I can't claim "Cheeze Wiz" for Pittsburgh; it's a "generalization error": Having never seen "Cheese Whiz" written down — but having had it burned into me for 3 years as being most definitely the proper jawn to apply to any respectable cheesesteak by people for whom "whiz" flows like wooder — I reasoned that, since the brand wouldn't dare to identify its product as "cheese", it must be spelled "Cheeze", and then applying the same rule to "whiz"… "wiz"!
My, how far uns have crawlen.
Rodger C said,
January 4, 2024 @ 12:43 pm
Al Fagaly's Super Duck comic, which I must remember from reprints, used several eccentric spellings, of which I remember "cheeze" and "fawcett."
Chas Belov said,
January 5, 2024 @ 12:26 am
I, too, say pled (and "pleaded" sounds strange to me). I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.
Philip Taylor said,
January 5, 2024 @ 2:45 pm
It seems to me that most of us say what we have grown up hearing [1], and since I have always heard (and read) "pleaded", that is the form that I use. "Pled", if used by a speaker of my topolect, I would assume to be intentionally humorous — if used by a speaker of a different topolect, I would be undecided as to whether it was intentionally humorous or simply intentional (and normal, for that speaker).
[1] With some exceptions. For example, I always pronounce the first "e" in England/English /etc. as /e/, even though almost everyone I know pronounces it as /ɪ/. And "conduit" I pronounce as /ˈkʌn·dɪt/, because that is how I was taught to pronounce it at primary school (the normal pronunciation in my topolect follows the spelling — /ˈkɒn·dju‿ɪt /). And "trait", which always has a silent final "t" for me, ’though most other speakers of my topolect sound it.
Philip Taylor said,
January 6, 2024 @ 5:02 am
« "Pled", if used by a speaker of my topolect, I would assume to be intentionally humorous » — like "snuck", when used as a replacement for "sneaked", as in "he snuck out the back". I was trying to think of this analogy when I wrote the comment above, but could not remember the word in question.
Philip Taylor said,
January 6, 2024 @ 5:47 pm
A remarkable co-incidence : I picked up a second-hand copy of Alasdair Gray’s Poor things [1] whilst at the bowls club today, and started reading it in bed this evening. You can imagine my surprise on encountering the following on page 25 —
"Pled". The speaker is a Scots medical student, the date somewhere in the 1880s.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/72355
J.W. Brewer said,
January 7, 2024 @ 11:23 pm
To Philip Taylor's parallel drawn between "pled" and "snuck," one possible difference might be (in his topolect context, where I take it both seem comically non-standard) that "plead" is often a more high-register word but "sneak" a more low-register word, such that a non-standard past tense might seem more cromulent for the latter. FWIW, MWDEU, adverted to upthread, has relevant entries (focused on American usage) for both "plead" and "sneak," addressing "pled" and "snuck" respectively. The perhaps interesting difference in AmEng is that "pled" was a respectable alternative (although it never drove "pleaded" out of the market) from fairly early on (perhaps due to the Scots, as previously mentioned), whereas "snuck" started with a fairly marked association with stereotyped rustic/bumpkin speakers and comic writing but then slowly rose to respectability and standardness over the course of the 20th century.