This word cropped up in the office recently as I was writing an e-mail and I suddenly discovered – I am not sure how to write this as a past participle. What is the past participle of rota? Should it be rota’d, rota’ed, rotad or something else?
Can ‘rota’ be used as a verb?
The word rota is normally used as a noun. Everyone is happy with that, especially those who are looking to draw up a rota.
But very often the word rota is used as a verb, meaning to put something or someone into a rota. But what is the past participle of rota? If you rota someone in for something, are they rota’d in?
In that case, perhaps that should be rota’d on to do something – or just rota’d to do it – a subject for another blog post on English prepositions perhaps…
Past participle of rota: rotad, rotaed or rota’d?
The natural choice seems to be to write the past participle of rota as rotad. But there is the niggling feeling that something is missing. This doesn’t look like the word rota anymore and just leaves me asking what is a rotad?
Again, rota’d seems a better choice because it still looks like the original word rota. Although purists will question the grammatical correctness of using an apostrophe here. And rotaed? That just looks weird.
Of course we could avoid the issue altogether by using a different word entirely, perhaps rostered or even scheduled.
But this would indicate that we can’t use the word rota as a verb at all, which surely can’t be true. Many English speakers use rota as a verb and it sounds right.
Words ending with letter ‘a’
Then what about other similarly problematic words that end with the letter ‘a’ if we want to use them as verbs?
We cha cha cha’d at the weekend and conga’d yesterday, then rumba’d and salsa’d this morning.
All this dancing is making me want a cup of tea and a sit down…
But there are other words that don’t require such nimble feet. Subpoena for example or the language of the farmyard – has anyone baa’d or moo’d recently?
There is no such problem for words ending in an ‘e’. For example, the words ‘free’ and ‘tiptoe’ easily take a ‘d’ ending to create their past tenses: ‘freed’ and ‘tiptoed’.
So it seems that words ending in the letter ‘e’ escape the problem of the uneasy past participle. Their final ‘d’ fits neatly after their ‘e’. But where does that leave words ending in ‘a’?
There seems to be no definite ruling on the correct past participle of rota or the correct past tense usage for other words ending in ‘a’.
Is this a gap in English grammar? Perhaps it is simply a matter of taste.
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments box.
