Past Tense of Sink: Sank or Sunk

choi

Past Tense of Sink: Sank or Sunk
Jonathan Jones, Punk with a Paintbrush: How Turner Sunk the Empire. The Guardian. Oct 21, 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/arta ... pire-trafalgar-day-

Note: The verb sink has past tense sank and past participle sunk, so say British-English dictionaries (Collinsdictionary.com and Lexico.com, the latter being Oxford online dictionary). But American English has sunk as an additional past tense. See  
(a) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sink
(b) sink (v, "past tense sank or sunk American English")
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), undated.
https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/sink

Longman -- founded by Thomas Longman (1699 – 1755) in London -- is now owned by Londoin-based Pearson PLC
(c) Patricia T O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, Honey, I Sunk the Boat. Grammarphobia, Jan 28, 2010
https://www.grammarphobia.com/bl ... -sunk-the-boat.html
(William Safire: "Because Walt Disney got to me, I guess: the 1989 movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids [Production companies  Walt Disney Pictures[,] Silver Screen Partners III" en.wikipedia.org] did to 'shrank' what Winston cigarettes did to 'as': pushed usage in the direction of what people were casually saying rather than what they were carefully writing")
(i) get to (v): "(get to someone) informal  annoy or upset someone by persistent action"
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/get_to
(ii) Winston tastes good like a cigarette should
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi ... _a_cigarette_should
("Reynolds used the slogan from Winston's introduction in 1954 until 1972. * * * Advertising agency William Esty Co. deliberately, and ungrammatically, used 'like' rather than 'as' in the slogan and jingle"/ sectiomn 3 Grammar controversy: "When the players in The Beverly Hillbillies spoke the line, they stretched the grammatical boundaries further:
        Jed: Winston tastes good...
        Granny [Jed's mother-in-law]: Like a cigarette had ought-a!")

• had ought: "chiefly dialectal : OUGHT —usually used with to   <I had ought to go but I don't want to>"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/had%20ough
, which says that there is NO "Have ought" -- only "had ought" to mean present tense "ought to." So the example in correct grammar is: "I ought to go but I don't want to."
• Cambridge online gives two examples of the past:
ought to: "<We ought not to have agreed without knowing what it would cost>  <They ought to have arrived at lunchtime but the flight was [note the past tense] delayed>"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ought-to
(iii) I fail to find translation for:
Here's an example from Arthur and Merlin (circa 1330): 'Wawain on the helme him smot, / The ax sank depe, god it wot.'
"And here it is in Sir William Jones's poem Seven Fountains (1767): 'The light bark, and all the airy crew, / Sunk like a mist beneath the briny dew.'
(d) linguistically speaking:

Is the past tense for sink, sank or sunk?  Socratic Q&A
first answer on June 25, 2016:
https://socratic.org/questions/i ... r-sink-sank-or-sunk

second answer on June 27, 2016
https://socratic.org/questions/i ... sink-sank-or-sunk-1
("This verb [sink] is from the oldest period of English language development ]Old english]. It's an 'inflected' verb, which means it changes its internal spelling as it goes through the tenses.   
Past tenses and past participles of verbs from a more modern period of English end in '-ed,' such as 'worked,' 'talked"' and others: "'work, worked, worked' ")
(i) I do not know whether the second answer is true at each and every word, though work is derived from Old English -- and talk, Middle English.
(ii) English irregular verbs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs
("Irregular verbs in Modern English * * * derive from Germanic strong verbs, which make many of their inflected forms through vowel gradation, as can be observed in Modern English patterns such as sing–sang–sung. The regular verbs, on the other hand, with their preterites and past participles ending in -ed, follow the weak conjugation, which originally involved adding a dental consonant (-t or -d). Nonetheless, there are also many irregular verbs that follow or partially follow the weak conjugation")