To wonder why 'to text' has no past tense?

[alicetrefusis]

[GibberTheMonkey]

I'm the same SoH. I've never heard it here either.
I have heard some terrible grammar though and I'm no expert.

[level3at6months]

If it's not texted as a regular verb in the past tense, how could the present form 'I am texting' be correct? Or is there a whole new level of grammatical horror of which I'm not aware?

[TheRealFellatio]

I say texted. People who use text as both the present and the past tense get an old-fashioned look from me. (although I accept that as we use read for both present tense and past tense it may be permissablr but I still don't like it - it sounds daft.)

And as for people who say texties for the pural of text - well..there are no words...

[FairPhyllis]

I think what is happening when people say 'I text you last night' (I haven't ever heard this myself though) is phonological rather than morphological - the final syllable of 'texted' is being dropped or assimilated because it's an unstressed syllable. So people fully intend to use the regular past form but it happens to sound like the present because of sound processes in English. It is probably subtly different to the present if you could do an acoustic analysis of it.

In fact I am certain that this will be a sound thing rather than an irregular/absent past because 1) people just don't on the whole use irregular pasts for neologisms and 2) past tense is not optional for English speakers; whereas changes to unstressed final syllables are very common processes of language change.

Or of course all these many people running around using 'text' could be Latinists and are imitating the Latin vivid past ...

[Bowlersarm]

FairPhyllis I would say 'when I sent you the text last night'...

[JamieandtheMagicTorch]

FairPhyllis

That's really interesting. I agree.

[TheRealFellatio]

Good God Jamie the black woman (number 4 I think?) is the only one who even looks fully human out of that lot.

[JamieandtheMagicTorch]

It's a shocker, isn't it?

The comments are what made me laugh, and the programme titles

[bellablot]

How about - 'I sent him a text message' or such like. Text is a noun not a verb, therefore doesn't have a past tense. Texted is just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

[ZingWidge]

course it can be a verb!

" stop talking to me, I'm texting Lucy"

see, done. It's a verb

I also say: "I'm going to Ebay some clothes" - so Ebay is used as a verb.

[bellablot]

But surely it would be 'I'm going to sell some shite on eBay' not 'eBay some shite'?

[ZingWidge]

yap. I Ebay stuff. quicker to say or write and everyone knows what I mean

[FoodieToo]

All very interesting!
But I could not say ' I texted'. Offends my natural understanding of grammar. It sounds wrong to me.

[FairPhyllis]

Yeah I think it's a combination of the unstressed final syllable and that particular consonant cluster at the end of 'text'. If the vowel in the final syllable gets reduced to schwa or perhaps deleted altogether (which is common in final unstressed syllables), then you end up with a /kstd/ sequence which isn't permissible in English as it's too many consonant sounds together.

You'd have to hear it in context to know it was a sound change and not a vivid past stylistic thing though - you'd want to hear the speaker using other pasts in proximity to it to rule that out.

It might be influenced by a sound analogy with other past forms too, because /ksd/ is a common sequence at the end of a whole bunch of past forms (like 'mixed', hexed' etc).

[ZingWidge]

foodie just consider it as an irregular verb!

[FairPhyllis]

foodie I bet you didn't like everyone saying 'medaled' at the Olympics either

[ZingWidge]

was "tweet" used as a verb before Twitter?
genuine question.
I'm not English and just don't remember ever hearing anyone saying "a bird tweeted".

[squoosh]

Oh birds have always 'tweeted'!

[HoikyPoiky]

The climbers summited the mountain Please tell me that's not right either.

[FairPhyllis]

Yes. The OED has it as a verb (in the bird sound sense) from 1851 on. But it was a noun before that! And before that it was an onomatopoeic word for bird noise used in a quotative way (from 1550 onwards).

[ZingWidge]

thanks for that Fair

I knew about "tweet-tweet" to imitate bird sound (from song also).

another one that surprised me when watching Friends was Phoebe doing the fake posh thing at Mike's parents' house and asking "where does everyone summer?"

until that episode I'd never heard that expression, but then I realised that in Hungarian we say exactly that! ( not in a posh way though, no-one there is posh anymore! but we say "where did you summer?" etc)

[HeavenlyYoni]

I say texted. Irritates me when I see text used

[mathanxiety]

I use texted. I also say Euros. Euro used as a plural and text used as a past tense just don't sound right to me.

[mathanxiety]

French birds say cui cui.