Why is the past tense of buy not buyed but bought? Often the verbs most likely to have such irregular forms are the simplest, reflecting the residue of centuries-old grammatical features. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Buyed vs. Bought”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Chris from Columbus, Wisconsin, and I’m calling because my kids and I were sitting around working on spelling words. Specifically, the lesson was on the O-U-G-H-T area, and, you know, we had a conversation of why is it that we have simple words like by, and the past tense is significantly more complicated than the root word.
So, you know, buy is now bought instead of just buy’d. That’s a fantastic question.
So you’re looking at these verbs that have a regular conjugation. So we don’t say buy’d, right? Or I buy’ded that. Correct.
And, you know, we tend to try to simplify things in English for the most part. But then we have these, you know, very complicated past tenses compared to the root word.
Are your kids around? Are they available or is it just you? It’s just me right now. Okay. But we do listen to the program as a family, so they will hear this.
All right. Well, here’s what you can tell them, and you can be the all-knowing dad. Tell them that every time you look at a word like that, like bought, and there’s a few others that fit this structure, they’re looking into history.
They’re looking back hundreds or even more than a thousand years into the older forms of English that no longer exist. So it’s a residue of older grammatical systems, older ways of making verbs and to conjugate them or inflect them and turn them into past tense or future or what have you.
And it tends to happen with the words that we use the most. The ones that are most irregular are the ones that we repeat to ourselves and to other people, and that’s how they stay consistent.
So we have a lot of different stuff we’ve inherited from our French history, the Germanic roots, or from little bits here and there from the Celtic languages, or Old Norse, or what have you, stuff that we’ve invented on the, that is true English, its own thing.
And all of these show up one way or the other in our verbs and our conjugations. Well, that is excellent. Thank you very much.
And the thing to tell them is that in the old days, those verbs were regular. That was the ordinary way to conjugate them, and they weren’t exceptional. But we’ve hung on to them because a verb like to buy is really, really common.
Commerce has been around as long as human history. Literally, almost literally, the first documents that we have written in any language are about commerce. So buy is a really old word. So they’re really looking at the footprints of history there.
Well, thank you very much. That is great. Well, tell them hi for us. What are their names? Jack and Ivy, who were doing spelling at that time. But, yeah, they will enjoy this.
Okay. Shout out to Jack and Ivy. Yeah, thanks, Chris. We really appreciate it. Keep up the good work.
You betcha. You guys keep up the good work, too. Enjoy the program. All right. Thank you. Take care now. Bye-bye.
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