Although it's true that some verbs have variant past participles, would you agree with the following?

Question

You can say 'I have burned the toast' or 'I have burnt the toast'.
You can say 'I have learned the behaviour' or 'I have learnt the behaviour'.

However, as an attributive adjective, we would speak about 'burnt toast' and not 'burned toast',
and we would speak about 'learned behaviour' and not 'learnt behaviour.'

Would you agree with all four of those statements?

And, more importantly, does anybody have any idea why this is true (I mean, why we would exclude one of the variants in attributive adjective position, and why it should be the _regular_ variant for 'learn' but the _irregular_ variant for 'burn')?

Answer 1

Yes, that is the way we use them here in America. The -t ending is the original British usage, and that is still the way they spell it. It just became the custom in America to used the -ed ending for verbs. Not sure why the -t has been retained for burnt and not learned as the preferred form of the adjective, but maybe it is because it is a little easier to say.

Answer 2

It's not just the "t" participles. We would say "molten metal", but we would never say "the ice has molten". In some cases, we use the historical participles (molten, burnt), and in some (learned) we use the "regularized' participles. Why? Who knows? Just seems to say that English trys to regularize irregularly.

Answer 3

Probably simply the traditional forms people adopted in majority. But yes, I agree with all four.