Learned or Learnt?

[denislawsbackheel]

Learned is the past tense
I learned to swim

Learnt is the adjective
Salivating to a bell was learnt behaviour.

 

[GStar]

'Learned' sounds like you've never learnt anything. ;)

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

I always use learnt. As somebody else said before, learned would be spelt the same as the learned meaning knowledgeable so using learnt seems less ambiguous.

Also 'spelled', especially, sounds very American to me.

I got a bit annoyed at my lecturer the other day for spelling memorise as 'memorize'. We have enough people from the USA at Edinburgh Uni to corrupt our language without the English staff resorting to it too!

 

[Sigh]

I always use learnt. As somebody else said before, learned would be spelt the same as the learned meaning knowledgeable so using learnt seems less ambiguous.

Also 'spelled', especially, sounds very American to me.

I got a bit annoyed at my lecturer the other day for spelling memorise as 'memorize'. We have enough people from the USA at Edinburgh Uni to corrupt our language without the English staff resorting to it too!

Your lecturer is correct and you are wrong. The American use of "z" rather than "s" in many words is something they inherited from us and have maintained. The use of "s" across the board in British English is a VERY recent import from a. France and b. Australia where the intellectual elite began to drop "Z" to differentiate themselves from their American counterparts for POLITICAL reasons and adopt, incorrectly an eytomology based in French, and the media during the 1980s who began to adopt the Australian "S" style as a certain Murdoch began to influence all manner of things...

Don't believe me?

Pick up any textbook before 1970 and have a close look at all those words you think, when spelled with a "Z", are American. Grab some old newspapers on microfiche and have a gander.

Now, then, if this bollox can be done right in front of everyones' eyes, and everyone believes "s" is actually the traditional and proper form (it is NOT), what else goes on? The irony here is we have the "great" British public actually defending a novelty as proper and traditional, whilst the proper and traditional is mocked as an Americanism.