I think a lot about language design and change, but since I’m not a linguist, and since there’s so much out there I’ve yet to read, I’m loathed to write down any thoughts whatsoever, in case they turn out to be embarrassingly wrong. However, I’m allowed to change my mind and make retractions if necessary, so here we go.

Tim Bray proposes to change the past participle of “;to read” from read to readd. Interesting choice, but like all attempts at language reform, I don’t think it will catch on, because without the short explanation attached to each use, everybody will think it’s just a typo. There are four solutions to this problem:

1. A massive advertising campaign along with high profile writers agreeing to the new usage.
2. Recognition from a language authority, like the OED, so that future generations will be brought up with the modified spelling. Similar to Kuhn’s paradigm shifts in the structure of scientific revolutions.
3. Grassroots usage by bloggers (which includes all independent publishers). I readd some good blog entries on this subject.
4. Coining only self-explanatory words.

This last one is tricky, but we do it all the time. Everybody uses words that aren’t found in any dictionary, simply by joining together two or more old words in an interesting way, such as the hilarious anarchovegan. To create and interpret these words, you just need a pool of prefixes, suffixes, roots and joining principles. Most people find this easy.

That’s fine for word fusion, but what about shorter words like readd? The only way I can think to make a new past participle for “to read” self explanatory is to fuse together read and the most common “past tense ending”, “-ed”. We do this all the time when verbing, although when applied to irregular verbs, we consider the results ugly and incorrect: breaked, blowed, flyed, haved, doed, losed, runned, weared, beginned, maked, readed, etc.

So what is wrong with “readed”? It sounds like something a child would say, which for some reason is interpreted as a bad thing, whereas it’s actually rather clever, in a simple way: it distinguishes itself from the present tense, and is totally understandable. Although it sounds wrong, there’s no doubt that you are talking about having read something in the past.

The biggest barrier to using readed is the same one that spelling reform in general finds itself up against: the instinctive gut reaction that you are looking at something which is wrong.

This kind of problem probably stems from English evolving from a spoken form (where the verb “to read” works) into a written form (where it doesn’t). I hope it will evolve into a typed form. Speaking is so unnecessarily messy.