I am confused

[cema]

Pay - paid, not payed
Play - played, not plaid

Is that a rule or an exception? (This being English, may not be that different.)

Comments

[nieuwe-zijd.livejournal.com]

Бывает хуже:

relay (tiles) -- relaid

relay (pass along) -- relayed

Hope that helps...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_ira_/]

хм :) эк у них все наоборот ...

[flaass.livejournal.com]

Может, трехбуквенные корни *ay по первому типу, а длиннее - по второму?

[cema.livejournal.com]

Может быть. Say - said; bray - brayed. Не знаю, правило ли это; но кажется ("чувствуется"), что да. Но я не эксперт и мне хотелось внешних подтверждений; это пока первое.

[flaass.livejournal.com]

Нет, не работает. Вот там ниже pay, а еще bay - лаять.

[cema.livejournal.com]

So it's clear now: bay is the exception! :-)

[potap.livejournal.com]

As a rule, such phaenomena are exceptions.

Collins English Dictionary

[meskhi.livejournal.com]

play comes from [Old English plega (n.), plegan (vb.); related to Middle Dutch pleyen

pay comes from Old French payer

by the way, the second meaning of pay - Nautical. to caulk (the seams of a wooden vessel) with pitch or tar

has past tense payed

[eta-ta.livejournal.com]

ну почему же, plaid вполне себе exist тоже

Сема, не заморачивайтесь правилами

[http://users.livejournal.com/_rowan_tree_/]

"This being English, may not be that different" - exactly! As someone pointed out, rules are in Russian. In English you either know, or you don't.

[ygam.livejournal.com]

paid and laid have irregular spelling but regular pronunciation.

[cema.livejournal.com]

Yes, but this irregularity, is it part of a rule or an isolated special case?

[dumart.livejournal.com]

Let's pretend you create a (static) array of special cases. If the size of the array is big, you say this is a special rule. However, the size may be any integer number. Even for (size == 1) it may be considered a rule.

[cema.livejournal.com]

Technically, one could introduce a difference between a rule (code: something that can be executed) and an exception (data, such as an array or list of individual exceptions). In linguistics, my understanding is the situation is similar. Of course, if the rule only covers one or two cases, it is trivial and in practice not really different from an exception.

[besisland.livejournal.com]

It it were regulated by a rule it would not be called irregular.

[cema.livejournal.com]

However, it is. Not everything is logical, even in scientific terminology.

[calypso72]

Kids in US schools are now taught to read and spell phonetically. Words like this are called "red words" because they don't follow the rules. There are a lot of red words.

[cema.livejournal.com]

Yes, there must be plenty of such red words in English, and perhaps some of them may be grouped in rules. For others no useful rules may be found (or perhaps only trivial rules which cover one or two cases). Really, the difference between a rule and an exception may be murky.