Geordie "gan" - English "go"

[Shrdlu]

When did you develop asperger? And thought I was akward. I was making a humble suggestion because I saw similarities. I can understand finlay calling me an asshole because I have no clue about English dialects, but that was outright bullying.

[TaylorS]

I really don't know, but to me it looks the same as the American habit of turning -ing to in'.

Every dialect of English does this to some degree, asshole. It's just that it varies by location how stigmatised it is and what social class is more likely to do it – and there are still some dialects (although this time AFAIK they are mostly in America) which maintain a distinction between gerund/derivative noun [ɪŋ] and participle [ɪn]. So for them they would always say that they're "build[ɪn] a build[ɪŋ]".

And yeah, distinction carried over or not carried over from OE rather than a sound change of [ɪŋ]→[ɪn] or vice-versa.

I have this distinction, myself.

[Travis B.]

I lack a clear distinction in formal speech, due to the formal present participle ending /ŋ/, but have a rather clear distinction in everyday speech, due to heavily tending to use the present participle ending /n/ but otherwise largely preserving /ŋ/ for gerund endings and elsewhere aside from isolated cases like something.

For some reason, in particular the changing of /ŋ/ to /n/ over to gerunds, or for that matter other words except said isolated cases, really rubs me the wrong way, in way that "dialectal" forms normally don't. It's probably that it comes across to me as just "TV dialect" or something, being primarily used to it being missing from the dialectal forms I was actually familiar with in Real Life while growing up...

[Carlos]

aside from isolated cases like something.

Interesting. In rapid speech, I pronounce "something" as ['sʌin]. Otherwise it's ['sʌmθin] in more careful speech. Does anyone else do that?

"Nothing" is ['nʌθin] or in rapid speech the /θ/ can become an eth, an approximate, or be elided.
"Anything" on the other hand is ['ɛniθɪŋ].

When someone pronounces any <ing> as /ɪn/, it sounds very marked to me, especially when the consonant changes because of it e.g. sitting as ['sɪˈn̩], as I would pronounce it always as ['sɪɾin]. On the other hand, I don't notice when people pronounce <ing> as [ɪŋ]--in fact I used to assume that everyone pronounced <ing> as [in]. Nobody has ever commented on my [in] for <ing> on verbs and the word "something" interestingly enough--apparantly most people hear it as <ing>.

Other words:
being [bi::n] or in rapid speech [bi:n] (but distinct from been, which I pronounce as [bɪn]. Although I'm not pin-pen merged--Ben is always ['bɛn], never [bɪn].)
seeing [si::n] (or [si:n])
going ['gowin] (or ['gɔɪn])

Interestingly enough, hearing [iŋ] in words like king, sing, sounds very marked to me. I pronounce them with [ɪŋ]. (Hearing them with [in] would sound even stranger, but I've yet to hear someone do that.)

[jal]

However, there are a few verbs whose stem end in a vowel that have -n and where the schwa is lost instead of the n

I don't think the schwa was lost there: etymologiebank.nl has no schwa in the oldest forms, so it must not have been there before the change of -an into -@n in Old Dutch.

Reminds me of the Dutch teen meaning "toe", which is /te:n/ rather than /teən/

I wouldn't be surprised it there was a generic rule in Germanic about deleting the vowel in a VC suffix when the root ended in a vowel. "teen" btw is a singularized plural, from older "tee" (/te/). It was reanalyzed as singular, and got a regular plural "tenen" (/te.n@n/). Same happened with "schoen" (shoe) and "peen" (carrot).


JAL

[Shm Jay]

With the verbs"go" and "went", what would their paradigms? synopses? have been in Modern English, had they not been used for each other?

[finlay]

went came from wend, as in wend one's way.

[Travis B.]

With the verbs"go" and "went", what would their paradigms? synopses? have been in Modern English, had they not been used for each other?

We cannot really say per se, except that gaed, a weak regularization, is found in at least Scots as the preterite of gae, and went is actually originally a weak preterite of wend (even though in modern usage a new weak preterite, wended, has been created to replace it for wend itself).

[Yng]

'to go' had an older preterite in 'eod-' before it replaced that with 'went'; it could have retained that (but I have no idea what that would have produced in ME).

[Skomakar'n]

Really? Not *ging?

Oh. Now I see that this apparently wasn't even the case in PG, theoretically... How come it became some variation of "ging" in all modern varieties except for English and Scots (and maybe some more, smaller ones)?

[Yng]

No. eode was suppletive, just like 'went'.

[Herra Ratatoskr]

'to go' had an older preterite in 'eod-' before it replaced that with 'went'; it could have retained that (but I have no idea what that would have produced in ME).

From everything I've seen, it would probably have been "yode". It appears in Le Mort D'Arthur and in Spencer.

[blank stare II]

In my dialect (Western American English), both are pronounced as [in].

IMD, nobody has heard of usin' this fancy schmancy "ing," whatever that is.



Appalachian English, in case anyone was wondering.

[----]

I only have ing in gerunds in careful speech. Whenever I'm having an actual conversation with somebody it's -in.