Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle
No, I think it's probably a Canadianism. I've been over here too long I guess!  |
You are both more or less right ... "gotten" (which is the past participle of "to get") was common in Middle English ... read some Chaucer and you will come across it all the time. It seems to have passed out of use in British English, a lot like the moribund subjunctive; but is still quite common in North American English. Past participles are used in the perfect tenses, and the "-en" ending can be found still used in many other verbs: "to bite", for example ... "he has bitten off more than he can chew." In British English, numerous past participles have been replaced by the simple past form. English is a lazy, non-inflected language which has divorced itself from the Latinate grammar that would have been familiar to Shakespeare ... not to mention Milton, who uses periodic sentences whose structure would have been familiar to Horace and Juvenal ... and to Dr. Johnson.
I hope that is sufficiently confusing ... and now I'm going to pour another drink and spark one up.
