Why is 'dreamt' not 'dram'?

[Pavlov]

Can you explain this to a 3 almost 4 year old?

She tells us every morning 'i dram about i was a fairy' or 'i dram a bad dream' [furrowed brow]. I say it back to her 'did you? you dreamt you were a fairy?' 'no, i dram, not dreamt mama. That's silly'.

And so I am thinking. I think she is right.

And, is it 'dreamed'? or is it 'dreamt'? seeing as, if I am going to correct her (which I might not, we all have our quirks eh? ) i should get it right!

Ah this is the same principle, to a child, as drink drank drunk isn't it?

yes, and i guess 'run, ran'

It is in fact rather clever of her I think, if we think purely logically!

dreamed and dreamt are both right, you can use either

and it is cos they is irregular verbs innit.

they're just applying the normal rules, so she is doing it "right" it isn't her fault that someone somewhere decided to make some of them a bit different!

The non-standard conjugation must be weird for children. Irregular verbs seem so arbitrary. I won't bore you but they used to make sense. It was very old conjugation rules that made them that way.

My dd is 3 and insists it's 'flied'.

ShowofHands - now you need to explain it to me so I can interpret and simplify. Not sure she will get that explanation

Well once upon a time, the irregular verbs would have been regular as they came from conjugation systems that had very clear rules. We no longer use these systems but have kept some of the irregular verb usage. Things like proto-Germanic language where there is a vowel shift when using a past participle. So I ride my bike, I rode my bike, the bike was ridden for example came from a vowel shift that was adopted into our language from Indo-European language.

Can you explain to her that our language used to be made up of other languages and the language we use now is very different to Old English from yesteryear. But we still use some of the old ways of talking even though they don't make obvious sense anymore. It is difficult to understand.

Is it true that we have one the most complex language systems to learn?

I might not tell her anything. Just enjoy the innocence of incorrect speech while it lasts .

I think there's good argument to suggest that all lanaguages are equally complex to learn. Because it depends on who is learning, the prevalance of the language, its root parts and its phonology. For example, I found Spanish very easy to learn as its phonology is similar to my first language (English) but somebody from Japan would find it much more difficult. So it's difficult to test.

In terms of purely how long it takes on average to lean a language, things like Arabic, Mandarin, Korean etc are definitely the hardest.

The two biggest problems with English are the number or irregularities and the great use of the non-literal. We don't struggle, for example, with the question 'what's up?' but literally it's very odd.

Ah! This is one of the things that you will talk about as a family when she is older. "Do you remember when you used to say ...."

Keep correcting her, don't explain anything (she's way too young to appreciate stuff about linguistic shifts!), and she'll get the hang of it eventually.

i thought of this thread this morning when ds1 came in and said "ds2 just threw paper all over the floor"

think it's the first time he has ever said "threw" rather than "throwed" lol