participle, as in, Honey, I have shrunk the kids. But today it can sometimes be found, besides shrank, as a simple past tense form. So these past tense forms continue to evolve within modern English. But the key is that this evolution is not a new aspect of English. It's been going on for about a thousand years.

So forget trying to make any sense out of these various forms today. There really isn't much sense to be had. The forms evolved in a somewhat random manner over the centuries, and they continue to evolve. Now this is only the beginning of the confusion. The fact is that history has not been kind to those 300 or so strong verbs from the Old English period.

They've been battered and beaten and broken down over the centuries. As we know, a very large percentage of the words in Old English have simply disappeared from the language. And that high rate of attrition took care of a lot of those Old English strong verbs.

Of the 300 or so strong verbs in Old English, about half of them completely disappeared from the language, gone forever. So that left about 150 which still survive in some form in Modern English. But the popularity of that weak ED verb form was so great that about half of those 150 strong verbs have been converted into weak ED verbs over the centuries.

In other words, they lost their older internal vowel changes, and today they just use the standard ED ending. So they were broken down over the centuries. And this is consistent with the general desire of English speakers to use fixed word forms. We don't really like having to change the form of the word. So over the centuries, words like climb, glide, shove, chew, and burn all evolved from strong