The Words We Use

An American teacher, Jeanne Hunter from Boston, temporarily living in Cork, wrote to me about a word she heard in a bar in the…

An American teacher, Jeanne Hunter from Boston, temporarily living in Cork, wrote to me about a word she heard in a bar in the west of that county. A local man announced to the barman that the police had catched somebody or other wanted for a spate of robberies. This past tense may still be heard in the English of New England, my correspondent tells me.

It is found all over England today and is by no means uncommon in rural Ireland. Cotched is a Wexford version: Patrick Kennedy, in The Banks of the Boro, has `he cotched the tay-cup by the handle'. Trollope, in his Land-Leaguers, written in 1885, has: `If he cotches a hould o' ye he'd tear ye to tatters.' Dickens has the London ketch.

Spenser, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Donne, Defoe and Pope used both catched and caught; Samuel Johnson used caught in his writings but said catched when talking to his friends. The King James Bible uses caught only; Kit Marlowe always used caught; Bunyan stuck to catched. In the nineteenth century catched receded into dialect.

Ms Hunter wants to know where the two forms came from. A very complicated story, I'm afraid.

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An assumed Late Latin verb captiare, to hunt, ambush, gave Norman French cachier, and Middle English cacchen, to chase. The same Latin verb also gave Medieval French chasser, which gave Middle English chasen, and the modern chase. Next, the verb latch, still in use in the phrase "to latch on to", enters the field to complicate matters further. This verb, meaning to grasp, is a English word, coming from Old English through Middle English lacchen. The closeness of the forms cacchen and lacchen led to the two verbs sharing the sense `to grasp'. Early in its history catch was being used in the modern sense, to capture, grasp, after a chase. Chassen adopted the sense `to chase, to hunt'.

So, strangely, we have catch, a verb from French, having a strong past tense inflection (caught), associated with words of Old English origin. But caught didn't come from French; it was formed by analogy with the strong past tense of latch, which used to be laught. When latch came into Modern English it lost its strong inflection; catch inherited it. But catch also had a weak-inflection form like most verbs from the French; and so, Ms Hunter, Modern English has two competing forms, caught and catched. And that's as simple as I can make the complicated story.