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shauncochransbox
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October 23, 2009
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Past tense of “text”
- October 23, 2009, 4:17pm
Text sounds silly when pronounced texted for the same reason as build sounds silly as builded, or goose sounds silly as gooses. Am I wrong or is the reason that these words are not pronounced the way that they should be is because they just plain sound silly coming out of the mouth. Does the word builded break any rules at all?? I dont think it does. Neither does the word gooses. The reason we dont use that form of the word today to diplict a flock of geese is simply the fact that we dont like the way it sounds. We as a people decided it sounded as though you were uneducated when you spoke such words maybe? We even went so far as to change the spelling of these words dramatically!! Just so that we would never have to hear them spoken again. LoL Am I right here folks? The problem with the word text is that you cant change its spelling. Just like the examples that have been given, which were all small 3 or 4 lettered words such as cut, fit, hurt, put, rid, shut. We couldnt change the original spelling of these words so we just decided to leave them as they were. These words all sound just fine when using them in past tense form. This is my reason for thinking texted sounds silly and out of place in the English language. It should definitely IMO be left alone just as these other words have been because it just plain sounds better.
I just text my girl to look at this thread because I always correct her when she says texted.
I just texted my girl to look at this thread because I always correct her when she says text.
I think text will win out in the long run because of this fact.
Past tense of “text”
If you need examples of words that have changed in this manner throughout history simply look at the long list of I-mutations.
"I-mutation is caused by the very human habit of laziness: taking the shortest distance between two points. The plural of man in ancient West Germanic, the ancestor of Old English, used to be a word something like *manniz. The speakers "cheated" on the first vowel in the word to be in position for the second vowel. It's the same thing you do with doing. It doesn't change the meaning of the word to do so.
So after hundreds of years of this, the plural came out as *menniz, or something similar, when people said it. Eventually, the shifted vowel itself comes to stand for the plural, and since laziness dislikes doing the same job twice, the syllable at the end of the word slowly shriveled and dropped off."
This of course explains why we geese, and built. Instead of builded and gooses. So all of you guys talking s*** about people being lazy by saying text instead of texted need to realize just how many words that you use on a daily basis came to be exactly in this way.
Again, it is only my opinion that the smaller words which spellings could not be altered and sounded fine were left alone. But when you look at the lengths we will go to for these other words to not sound so silly, it kind of makes some sense of it all, doesnt it?
This is the full article from The Online Etymology Dictionary which I quoted from:
http://www.etymonline.com/imutate.php