fecht?

Chomsky and Halle, in leaching every bit of patterning out of memory and concentrating it in rules, had to propose implausible deep structures for words, and could not explain why irregular verbs come in families of similar forms...
- Steven Pinker, Words and Rules

Darn you, Steven Pinker! Well, I haven't yet read the chapter where he goes on to demonstrate how his hybrid-ish theory is Much Better than other theories of how the mind puts together past-tense verbs (among other things) and debunk the whole Deep Structure of Words idea that Chomsky had suggested... but come on... whether or not it's true, the whole idea that a lot of the history of the word is implicitly built into the word itself, with the oft-unpronounceable Deep Structures (and proto-Germanic roots rising up through the collective memory of the English-speaking world) residing in one's mind is endlessly beautiful. Gah. I want that I should produce "fought" as a past-tense as a result of a now-defunct root that looks like "fecht" (which gets inflected and mangled by all sorts of rules between the lexicon and my mouth), which I picked up implicitly as part of the culture and the language... that's what I want to happen.

But Steven Pinker says that this is not so. But Chomsky is almost always Right.

*laughs* Oh, the Really Important Things in life...

EDIT: "But Chomsky is *always* right!"
-- Esther eponis