![]() In January I was involved with the organizing for the big pro-Second-Amendment demonstration in Richmond, VA. ![]() I have a field sighting of the form "yoten" to report. The OED dates the Middle English version to 1440.) It is an earlier variant of the more common ye, meaning "to address with you/ye". (As a side note, yeet actually could be a legitimate English verb with a long pedigree. Also common enough to exert an analogical influence. Has that /i:/ with a final non-nasal stop consonant. I think the strongest influence would probably be "speak", past tense "spoke". So why is it "yote" and not "yeet" or "yate" that won out as the irregular "joke" past tense form? It is more fruitful to look at analogy in dealing with neologisms, especially in web English. Sociolinguistic factors, including various forms of prescriptivism, jocular or otherwise, do have an influence on language, however limited it may be. That doesn't mean to say that there won't be exceptions. However, the limited numbers of verbs fitting this pattern suggests that this ablaut (vowel change)-based past tense is not productive and is not undergoing some kind of resurgence in 2018. To "tweet" is perhaps the most salient example although "tweeted" is basically standard (based on the original standard verb), "twote" and (perhaps self-consciously) "twat" are attested. It appears to me that the verb derives from the noun, through standard English zero derivation ("verbing").Īlthough strong verbs are basically non-productive, a small set of one-syllable verb neologisms end in stop consonants, thus having the phonological appearance of Germanic strong verb. The interjection yeet! and the noun yeet (referring to the dance) is dated to 2014 on Vine, which came into more common use among teenagers about the end of 2017. That's why finding the first occurrence is so important. Is the past tense really yote, should it just be yeeted, or does it fall into another category of irregular English verb entirely? Are English strong verbs sercretly productive in certain situations (such as only with relatively simple verbs phonologically like yeet, or in American English only) or are they dead and gone? If there is a new strong verb system emerging, what does/should it look like?Īlthough it may be tempting to look back towards Old English prototypes, one has to be aware of the time depth of any neologism. I feel that this is a very interesting topic as it seems to be (at least to my knowledge) the first coined strong verb. Even more problematic is that in class 5 there is the word /it/ which in the past is /eɪt/, so perhaps yeet's past should be yate? The /i:/ to /oʊ/ ablaut is really weird, and might mean the word was originally in class 5 but switched classes, and anyways means yeet should be spelled *yeat. The problem is, Germanic strong verbs don't behave like this. There is an ongoing discussion especially among younger people over whether yeet's past should be /ji:təd/, ("yeeted") or /joʊt/, ("yote"). It seems that the same thing has happened with the verb yeet. In English, the strong verb system is no longer productive and has almost completely disintegrated, but some American English speakers are back-forming strong verbs, such as dove instead of dived and snuck instead of sneaked (for me, a native American English speaker, dove and snuck sound more correct than dived and sneaked). ![]() Yeet (/ji:t/) is a recently coined verb in English that seems to have taken on the characteristics of a strong verb, as seen in this hilarious urban dictionary definition. ![]()
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