Braked and Broke

The car in front of me stopped suddenly and I braked quickly!  Or, wait... is it braked or broke?
-St. MBK

The answer is rather simple: "break" and "brake" are two different verbs with different past tense forms.  "To break" (as in "...your face") expresses past tense as "broke" and "to brake" (as in "...to avoid that SUV") is "braked."  Realizing I was surrounded by two English teachers and a copy editor, this discrete linguist was smart enough, however, to STFU and make another martini (or is it a "martinus"?). 

This hyper-correction is interesting for another reason.  Languages change because the world around them changes: new inventions need names, new people join the conversations, etc.  But, languages can also change because of their own internal pressures.  My friend St. MBK's hesitation over the -ED on "brake" reveals just such a linguistic fault line.

English verbs come in two flavors: strong and weak.  The latter form their past tense by adding -ED: "crash/crashed" or "brake/braked."  Strong verbs, on the other hand, are those that change their vowel instead: "break/broke" or "drink/drank."

When a new verb is coined from a noun, it is almost always weak. Thus, when the invention of the automobile necessitated the invention of a new verb meaning to use the brake, English speakers added it to the weak class that express the past tense with -ED.  The weak verbs have grown in number ever since the Dark Ages as a result of borrowings from other languages (which are almost always weak) and the English predilection for making verbs out of nouns.

The result of this linguistic beatitude is that the weak shall inherit the language. Over the centuries, a few verbs that were strong have become weak: "help/helped" for instance used to be "help/healp." More appear to be wishing to jump ship.  The reaction to this inevitable linguistic osmosis is to exclude such forms as "dive/dived" and "hang/hanged" from the prestige dialects.

St. MBK had the correct form of the weak verb "brake", but prescriptions against making strong verbs weak caused her to consider an incorrect form. So, if anyone asks about grammar tips on this blog, at least you can't say I never healp!