But in the presence of two exactly contrary tendencies, the one in accordance with the general movement of the language [Pg200] since the Norman Conquest and the other opposed to it, it is unsafe, of course, to attempt any very positive generalizations. All one may exhibit with safety is a general habit of treating the verb conveniently. Now and then, disregarding grammatical tendencies, it is possible to discern what appear to be logical causes for verb phenomena. That /lit/ is preferred to /lighted/ and /hung/ to /hanged/ is probably the result of an aversion to fine distinctions, and perhaps, more fundamentally, to the passive. Again, the use of /found/ as the preterite of /to fine/ is obviously due to an ignorant confusion of /fine/ and /find/, due to the wearing off of /-d/ in /find/, and that of /lit/ as the preterite of /to alight/ to a confusion of /alight/ and /light/. Yet again, the use of /tread/ as its own preterite in place of /trod/ is probably the consequence of a vague feeling that a verb ending with /d/ is already of preterite form. /Shed/ exhibits the same process. Both are given a logical standing by such preterites as /bled/, /fed/, /fled/, /led/, /read/, /dead/ and /spread/. But here, once more, it is hazardous to lay down laws, for /shredded/, /headed/, /dreaded/, /threaded/ and /breaded/ at once come to mind. In other cases it is still more difficult to account for preterites in common use. /Drug/ is wholly illogical, and so are /clum/ and /friz/. Neither, fortunately, has yet supplanted the more intelligible form of its verb, and so it is not necessary to speculate about them. As for /crew/, it is archaic English surviving in American, and it was formed, perhaps, by analogy with /knew/, which has succumbed in American to /knowed/.
Some of the verbs of the vulgate show the end products of language movements that go back to the Anglo-Saxon period, and even beyond. There is, for example, the disappearance of the final /t/ in such words as /crep/, /slep/, /lep/, /swep/ and /wep/. Most of these, in Anglo-Saxon, were strong verbs. The preterite of /to sleep/ (/slâepan/), for example, was /sl[=e]p/, and that of /to weep/ was /weop/. But in the course of time both /to sleep/ and /to weep/ acquired weak preterite endings, the first becoming /slâepte/ and the second /wepte/. This weak conjugation was itself degenerated. Originally, the inflectional suffix had been /-de/ or /-ede/ and in some cases /-ode/, and the vowels were always pronounced. The wearing down process that set in in the twelfth century disposed [Pg201] of the final /e/, but in certain words the other vowel survived for a good while, and we still observe it in such archaisms as /belovéd/. Finally, however, it became silent in other preterites, and /loved/, for example, began to be pronounced (and often written) as a word of one syllable: /lov'd/.[43] This final /d/-sound now fell upon difficulties of its own. After certain consonants it was hard to pronounce clearly, and so the sonant was changed into the easier surd, and such words as /pushed/ and /clipped/ became, in ordinary conversation, /pusht/ and /clipt/. In other verbs the /t/-sound had come in long before, with the degenerated weak ending, and when the final /e/ was dropped their stem vowels tended to change. Thus arose such forms as /slept/. In vulgar American another step is taken, and the suffix is dropped altogether. Thus, by a circuitous route, verbs originally strong, and for many centuries hovering between the two conjugations, have eventually become strong again.