You sink/sank/sunk my battleship
English continues to change, despite all attempts to stop it. One area where change is happening is in a peculiar set of verbs. Verbs that change their vowels to form the simple past and the past perfect are some of the oldest in the English language. They are called by linguists “strong” verbs, and harken back to day when that’s just how Old English werked. Examples are:
- sing, sang, sung
- ring, rang, rung
- drink, drank, drunk
- stink, stank, stunk
- shrink, shrank, shrunk
- sink, sank, sunk
- ride, rode, ridden
- write, wrote, written
- hide, hid, hidden
- strike, struck, stricken
- choose, chose, chosen
This has remained almost only in verbs where the primary vowel is I (iether /i/ or /iy/, since they wer all pronounced /i/ at one time). But there are elements of this remaining in other kinds of verbs, such as become/became/become and is/was. And many teachers have faut their students’ urges to say bring/brang/have brung.
Yet it has become very common—and apparently quite accepted—to use sunk and shrunk in place of sank and shrank, even tho the only word commonly accepted as taking this form properly is slink/slunk/slunk (the old form slank is archaic now and entirely nonstandard). A major feature film was called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
And the frase “You sunk my battleship” gets more hits on Google than “You sank my battleship,” even tho the werding appears in the famous television commercial in the traditional form.
In the Simpsons, Jasper jokes that Lisa “sunk my battleship.”
In a famous scene from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Deth seems to say “You have sank my battleship” but this is probably a side affect of his accent on the werds “You have sunk my battleship.”
Plus, there are a couple of terrible songs called “You Sunk My Battleship”.
