The hard breathing (aspirate) is often wrongly dropped or misput by less good speakers; but, while the upper ranks laugh at them for their mistakes, they themselves, like our brethren of Friesland and Holstein, often drop it from words to which it of right belongs, and mainly from the hard-breathed W or the Saxon HW (our WH).
| What, | wat (Hols.) |
| When, | wanne (Fri.) |
| Where, | wâr (Fri.) |
| Wheel, | weel (Fri.) |
| Whelp, | welp (Fri.) |
| While, | wile (Fri.) |
| White, | wit (Fri.) |
| (It is bad.) | |
Shall we soon hear ‘Wet the ’ook with a wetstone’ for ‘Whet the hook with a whetstone’?
Some Englishmen would say, ‘The ’ammer is on the hanvil’; and some have been known to say, ‘’enry ’it ’orace with the ’ollow of ’is ’and,’ for ‘Henry hit Horace with the hollow of his hand.’
English mark-timewords (participles) are of two kinds—one of an ongoing time-taking, as ‘the rising sun’; and another of the ended time-taking, as ‘the risen sun’; and they are of a few sundry shapes, some ending with -en, -n, as broken, and others ending with -ed, -d; and some without an ending, as cut.
1. In -en, those which are of one breath-sound, and moulded so that the bygone time-shape takes the sound (7) o[2]:—
| Bore, | borne. |
| Broke, | broken. |
| Chose, | chosen. |
| Clove, | cloven. |
| Drove, | driven. |
| Froze, | frozen. |
| Rode, | ridden. |
| Rose, | risen. |
| Shore, | shorn. |
| Smote, | smitten. |
| Spoke, | spoken. |
| Stole, | stolen. |
| Strode, | stridden. |
| Strove, | striven. |
| Swore, | sworn. |
| Tore, | torn. |
| Throve, | thriven. |
| Trode, | trodden. |
| Wore, | worn. |
2. Some one-sounded and moulded time-words, of the sound (8) in the shape for bygone time, take -en, -n; as,
| Draw, | drew, | drawn. |
| Grow, | grew, | grown. |
| Know, | knew, | known. |
| Throw, | threw, | thrown. |
| Flow, | flew, | flown. |
| Slay, | slew, | slain. |