Drive, shrive, strive? But there's still room for "improvement" in arrive, derive and deprive... :)
And there you have a neat dividing line between the verbs of Anglo-Saxon origin and those of Latinate/Norman French origin... only the Anglo-Saxon ones morph the vowel like that!
I was told (back "then", at the U in Warsaw) that the words which *kept* the original "irregularity" are the ones which were "vital" -- things like "eat", and "drink", and "be" (merry <g>) -- for others, the tendency was to "streamline" and use the -ed ending accross the board, though there are some which couldn't decide which way to go (or, rather, which way to "run" <g>), and kept only 2 of the forms, not all 3.
Which makes the US version of the past tense for "dive" all the more interesting and funny and, in a way, *typical*... Think of a new country's need for "tradition" (the irregular ones are older) and the mantle of respectability; where we don't *have* a past, we fabricate it... Think of the "swimming upstream" tendency that is, to a great extent, "responsible" for the establishment of this country...
Some of my cleaning ladies (many over the years; none seem to settle <g>) come up with irregular past tense forms which nobody taught me in school, but which seem to be common knowledge "in the county"... I dare say they're the future of the US-English, and y'all had better start expaning y'all's irregular verbs table... :)
----- Tamara P Duvall mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland
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