Ah, now I understand why. It’s a resurrected thread from 2007. I’m missing the point or relevance of your post, OP. Does it somehow connect to the strip Dave linked?
[ Edited: 17 September 2012 10:13 AM by aldiboronti ]
I think OP’s pic is meant to be relevant for its use of “medaling”. Great pun. But seriously, is “medaling” an example of verbing? Is it not being used in this case as an adjective?
It wasn’t always so, and there is dialectal variation that doesn’t use -ing.
The Old English participial ending was -ende. This eventually morphed into our present -ing, but during the Middle English period there was considerable variation: -ende, -inde, and(e), -ing(e). (Coincidentally, I lectured on this yesterday.)
The OED notes that you still find the -inde and -ande endings in Northern England and Scotland, but usually with the [d] muted, as in a singan burd (singing bird) or a gaan bairn (going child).
All present participles in English have an -ing ending, but they’re not all formed exactly the same way.
Some, like to want, add the ending directly to the infinitive form, wanting.
Some, like to take, drop letters from the infinitive before adding the ending, taking.
And some, like to hit, add letters, hitting.
There may be even more variation.
Okay but to my mind the rules concerning these formations are straightforward: someone appraised of the rules should be able to determine the present participle for any given verb (or am I wrong?) so you could call it regular. So many verbs are irregular with regard to the past participle, for comparison.
The OED notes that you still find the -inde and -ande endings in Northern England and Scotland, but usually with the [d] muted, as in a singan burd (singing bird) or a gaan bairn (going child).
I’ve never heard of a “gaan bairn” in the North of England and never heard “gaan” used as an adjective, though I’ve heard the two words used separately as in “yon bairn’s gaan yam” (that child’s going home). I’ve always assumed that “gaan” was the result of the -ing ending being smoothed out into -aan, because the north eastern dialect word for “go” is “ga(a)n”, “going” being “gannin” or “ga(a)n”, while in the north west (Cumbria) it’s “gah”, “going” being “gahn”. The Afrikaans word for “go/going” is “gaan”.
