Older past tense of dive To be dive, is still standard in British English. use dove as the past tense of dive started in the 1800s, and is now standard in American English. Both forms are correct today, but you should be aware of regional preferences.
By the time most native English speakers are adults, they have reduced irregular verbs. Give/give/give, bring brought to bring, take/take/take, dive…umm.
Some people say that diving/diving/divingand some will say diving/dove/diving. Who’s right? Both.
“Dive” suddenly got a new past tense in the 1800s
dive is a regular verb with a past tense that, since about 1300, has been dive. But in the 1800s, it suddenly had an irregular past tense—dove. How did that happen, and why, for the love of all verbs, would you complicate something that was previously so simple?
Drive is for driving just as diving is for pigeons
Blame drive. English speakers like their language to make sense, so they create order out of what looks like chaos. With verbs, we do that by arranging them into groups based on their infinitive. If the past tense and the past participle of bad smell To be smell And stinkyrespectively, any verb ending in –squid according to our mind, should follow the same pattern. And some do: drink/drink/drunk And sink / sink / sink. We apply this to drive And dive also. Past tense of drive To be driveand so we argue that diveshould be dove.
But what we want and what we have are two different things. Most of our irregular verb inflections are not based on modern English infinitives, but on infinitives of the etymology. Drink, sinkAnd bad smell they all come from the same group of Old English verbs, which is why they share the inflection in modern English. Blink And think look related to drink, sinkAnd bad smellbut they are not: we can tell by the forms they carry into modern English: wink / wink / wink And think/think/think.
Therefore, if dove is a modern invention, you shouldn’t use it, right? Some people will tell you that—that the correct past tense of dive To be dive. But a survey of the evidence for dive pointed out that dove actually twice as popular as dive today in American English, while dive more common in British English. If you are speaking American English, be aware that some people think that dive is the only proper past tense of divebut also know that you can get some funny looks if you use dive in the states.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
