So, today we did peer editing in English.

[conuly]

And the person I was working with is a non-native speaker from somewhere in the former Soviet Union, so there were a lot of mistakes (not all non-native speakers make a lot of mistakes, but she did, so).

One of them was "quitted" for quit, and I pointed this out to her specifically, thinking to explain the rule behind it so that she could generalize instead of memorizing long lists of words. So I said that "generally, but not always, verbs that end in it or et don't take -ed in the past tense". Which is true - set, hit, fit, knit, quit, let, bet, wet, pet....

But after I said it, I realized that it's not at all true, as far as I can tell, for words of more than one syllable - omit, abet, submit... okay, most of the ones I can think of end in -mit and have to do with sending. And I guess there's reset. But the question still remains: why doesn't this rule apply for two syllable words?

Comments

[deceptica]

*enter a confuzzled person with English as second language*

Your list of examples really took me by surprise. I always thought the past tense of knit was "knitted" and that of pet was "petted"... I looked into my trusty dictionary for confirmation and it told me that both "knit" and "knitted" exist as past tense forms of knit. The forms "fitted" and "betted" also seem to be accepted (rhyme!). And for pet I could only find the past tense "petted" and nothing else.

In my opinion the question shouldn't be why your rule doesn't apply to two syllable words, it should be why it already doesn't apply 100% to your monosyllabic examples.

[deceptica]

Oh, erm... I just saw your next post. Never mind. ;-)

[conuly]

But it does. In this case, the dictionary is simply functioning as a tool of prescriptivism and not telling us anything interesting about how language is actually used.