i am loathing the gradual creep of the term 'gotten' on here

[FrankietheSquealer]

Please desist

mathanxiety I find it odd that nothing in any of what you posted gives you a hint of the meaning.

Exactly. In any other language other than, it seems, American English (from what has been so forcedly pointed out by some on this thread), you have strict rules regarding tense:

I have got
I did get

or

I have
I have (archaic) either gotten/begot

With "gotten", it seems to substitute for proper use of tense and you have very little idea what it means. The current American use of gotten appears to be incorrect.

I also find it sad that there are people out there who have such little knowledge that they think the use of English was fixed by Shakespeare or Milton and that fixed RP some time around their times, without taking account of any regional variations that weren't fixed then at all. But as a result of that lack of fixing presumably, "gotten" fell out of use in the English language, and I find all these attempts to say that it is not a bit fake. Its more of a fashion trend at the moment, rather than resurrection of some fixed archaic use of English.

What is wonderful about English is that you can still hear the echos and the patterns of speech of other Germanic languages from the same family from which it is part. If you have any knowledge at all of these languages, you realise the importance of not over-emphasising Anglo-American cultures at their expense. Not lest because some of them were still spoken in parts of Britain until relatively recent times (in a historical sense).

Did get and have gotten are different tenses and gotten and begot are different words. The British English equivalent to have gotten is have got. You are confusing me, Chandler. You seem to think that the -en on the end of gotten is something to do with the -en in German plurals, too - at least, that's the only way I can make sense of some of your earlier comments about plurals. American Englishes both standard and variant have rules about ways of expressing tenses that are strictly followed. They're just different rules to the ones used in Standard British English.

I'm confused with gotten too. I think "get" is difficult in English (I was always taught to substitute "have") because its lost is prefix.

Anyone care to make an attempt to list the use of "gotten" in all the correct tenses and with plurals then?

"I have got" is surely the present tense. "I have gotten" is surely the past tense? Surely if this is a part of American English, there must be some books on American grammar which list the correct use of tenses?

I think we use "have got" like a compound verb to mean I have/own or I possess, as well as using it as a past tense of got where in the past we would've used "have gotten". In fact I wonder if usage of "have got" as a verb in itself meaning more or less "I have" ("I have got brown hair"/"I have brown hair") may have influenced us to lose the -en in our past tense of got ("I have got fat"(British)/"I have gotten fat"(American)).

So, "to have got" is a verb in its own right. Which happens to look very similar to one of the British English past tenses of "to get".

But I'm in no way sure, of course just conjecturing.

I have got lost with this discussion.
I.e. I am lost now, but I became lost some time in the recent past, which in this case is the last few posts.

Or I have got up, but I am not dressed yet. Meaning, I am up (present tense) but the activity i.e. getting out of bed, was in the past which was earlier this morning.

I say got, you say gotten, let's call the whole thing off.

Do people say 'I did get'?

From your post, I think gotten is indeed used correctly in the US.
It hasn't gotten out of hand.

'I have got' can also be expressed as 'I have'

Conjugation of the verb To Get:

To Get is a funny old verb though.

you can use "I did get/remember/buy" and so on the same way as "I do hate/love" etc - it's for emphasis.
IIRC

I suppose -- in the past tense it would be more for contradiction imo. Even then, using 'I did...' to contradict would be followed by '...so', or more likely, 'Yes I did'.

'I do hate/love' etc. is a form that I think is peculiar to England. I don't think you would hear it much in Ireland or the US.

math From your post, I think gotten is indeed used correctly in the US.

I don't think so. Language, especially English, tends to become less formal as time passes. I don't find it credible that the parts of England which used "gotten" in the past did so without a strict delineation of tense. You don't see that in American English - its almost impossible to work out when they acquired the thing they are talking about!

If you compare it to Yorkshire dialect, which retains an old and different way of speech ("thee", "thy" "thine", etc.) it delineates tense and the possessive pronoun and indefinite article much more clearly than in modern English.

Interestingly, Danish friend always says "I did get" when speaking English and can't cope with "gotten" at all as he can't work out which tense its supposed to be used in.

Yes, "gotten" is repulsive. Just checked in the definitive Old English dictionary and "get" was largely only in compound verbs so hard to pin down but it looks to me like if you conjugated it, the plural "we get" might give you the closest in Old English to "gotten". So you might use it - if you were a dick - when talking about something "we got" but not "I got".

A bit like the much abused "Ye" as in "Ye Olde Shoppe" actually comes from a plural for "the", which we no longer have, as English moved from being a language like French and German where word endings were changed (inflected) to a language where they weren't. So it is impossible to have "Ye" olde shoppe if there is only one olde shoppe. Not sure, but am guessing it would be impossible to have "gotten" anything if there is only one of you.

But it was always dodgy.

American English is much more old fashioned than British and tends to have preserved arcane words like, say "trash" where British English moved on and found new words. So it's likely "gotten" was acceptable at some point in the distant past.

As for Yorkshire dialect the thee and thine is even more subtle. It tends to infer the type of relationship you have with someone (I grew up speaking it). So we would only use "thee" with a family member or good friend. "You" implied a cold distance.

Why is it repulsive?

Joffrey yes, that's closer to my understanding of how English developed. The indefinite article always had a plural, as English, Dutch, etc retain to this day. The personal pronoun follows the same rules and English has lost these, although in a very few dialects (Shetland for example), people speak of "you" and "du" (more informal). I would make a guess that "gotten" in American English is a remnant from one or a very few groups from a very specific area, and that it has spread in a way that it did not in England.

Seneca I would say I don't like it, because its sounds lazy and wrong. As I said before, it doesn't differentiate between tenses correctly.

It's just ugly, as well.

In American English, tense is differentiated. "Gotten" is a past participle of an irregular verb. It's really not all that complicated or difficult.

grammarist.com/usage/got-gotten/

If it was past tense, why do we hear it so much in the present, then?

Americans don't use it in the present tense.

In what context have you heard "gotten" in the present tense?

Ye" as in "Ye Olde Shoppe" actually comes from a plural for "the"

I didn't think that was the case. I thought it was because the early printing presses came from the continent and they didn't need the eth symbol ð for th so used the nearest thing. It's still retained in Icelandic. We could usefully reintroduce it to distinguish the different sounds, because we have th as in the, th as in thing and also use the letters separately. Poor foreigners trying to learn the language.

Joffrey If it was past tense, why do we hear it so much in the present, then?*

Exactly.

"I've just gotten myself a new car". "I've gotten a newspaper".

Perhaps American English has virtually done away with the need for a present tense? Or do they just change the personal pronoun to change tense?

How on earth is grammar taught in American schools?

I didn't say it was past tense; I said it's a past participle. The examples you cite are the present perfect tense formed by using the past participle, not the present tense.

Your Danish friend may be a bit thick. Does he not understand the use of 'have'? It crops up a lot in English conjugation.

There seems to be confusion between German and English here.
the plural 'wir xxx-en' ending in German has nothing to do with the 'gotten' form of the verb 'to get' in American English.

Joffrey -- You most certainly don't hear it used in the present tense. If you do, you are listening to people who are not using it correctly or maybe you are mishearing 'getting'? Your examples are not the 'present tense.'

An American would not say 'I've just gotten myself a new car.' The word 'just' would rule out use of 'gotten'.
Similarly, 'I've gotten a newspaper' would indicate that some time or other, the person got a newspaper, and it could have been habitual or the phrase could be used in connection to a particular newsstand - 'I've gotten a newspaper from there in the past.' If a newspaper had just been bought, the person would say 'I got (or bought) a newspaper', or if someone else was looking for a newspaper, the person could say 'I've got one.'

I suspect from this thread that grammar is not taught too well in English schools, given the scale of misapprehension that is visible.

What examples? I gave none.