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I have seen the answers to this question, yet I am not entirely sure how to interpret the difference between "learned" and "learnt" in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Alice says "learned":

“Yes,” said Alice, “we learned French and music.”

However, the Mock Turtle says "learnt":

“Well, I can’t show it you myself,” the Mock Turtle said: “I’m too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.”

And so does the narrator:

(for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom [...])

So was it considered (in mid-19th century England) "correct, though childish" to say "learned"? Or was this difference meant to convey something else?

Edwin Ashworth
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SwedishOwlSerpent
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  • FWIW, Google 2-grams for I/we/they/never learnt/learned never seem to show the 'learnt' alternative in the ascendency [1800 ...] – Edwin Ashworth Apr 10 '23 at 13:08
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    I can't suggest why Lewis Carroll used two different spellings. Careless editing on the part of his publisher? – Kate Bunting Apr 10 '23 at 13:46
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    Rather than Alice being childish, it seems as if the Turtle talks in a more colloquial style to Alice's careful upper-middle-class English: "I can't show it you" isn't entirely standard - "show you it" would be usual. It's entirely common for an author to have different characters talk with different dialects, formality, or correctness, and it may not be bad editing. This seems a matter for Literature SE, not here, though. – Stuart F Apr 10 '23 at 15:14
  • There are no turtles resident in UK waters - we must assume he is a reasonably efficient non-native speaker. ;) – Greybeard Apr 10 '23 at 16:09
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    @Greybeard, All the more reason for Mock Turtles to supply the vacancy. – Brian Donovan Apr 10 '23 at 18:48

1 Answers1

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From statistical inference it can be concluded that it is unlikely that "learnt" was reckoned with as more appropriate.

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Given the important frequency of "learned" with respect to "learnt", it seems unlikely that "learned" could have been considered childish or even incorrect to some degree. This is confirmed by the even greater relative frequency that is shown in anterior periods in the following bigram.

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Besides, a similar situation is found for similar verb forms. There is nothing to support, generally, that a matter of correctness was at stake.

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There is a possibility that both forms were preserved because of the relatively greater easiness in pronouncing certain combinations.

LPH
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  • It may be worth noting explicitly that 0.002% (the upper range of how often learnt was used) is still pretty often. For comparison, the word cheap has a similar range of usage (NGram ), and that is a common English word. – TaliesinMerlin Apr 10 '23 at 15:01
  • @TaliesinMerlin What's in question is the status of "learned" in the mid 19th century. What inference on the correctness of "learned" is to be made from the absolute frequency of "learnt", which is found to be approximately that of a common word? – LPH Apr 10 '23 at 16:32
  • You can infer the relative level of appropriateness: is this a word rarely used in print, or only one used less commonly than learned? In this case it's the latter: learnt was accepted as valid variant in the mid-19th century. What you say doesn't contradict that, but I could see a reader seeing the numbers and concluding that learnt was entirely nonstandard. – TaliesinMerlin Apr 10 '23 at 16:37
  • @TaliesinMerlin I might see what you mean. You would be saying then that there is a point in asking the question about correctness as "learnt" is not to be dismissed on account of being nonstandard because of its would-be rarity, as this latter contention is false. – LPH Apr 10 '23 at 16:59
  • How reliable are the corpora? They look like Google ngrams. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 10 '23 at 18:11
  • @EdwinAshworth They are Google ngrams; I can't say anything about the reliability, I do not know the use of the corpora to any extent. I just assume that they can be trusted. – LPH Apr 10 '23 at 18:15
  • The usual assessment here seems to be 'they're better than nothing ... probably'. But here, I'd say (in fact did say) they're probably a fair guideline. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 10 '23 at 18:18