Heard in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger:
He’s [ǝdápɪd]. ‘He’s adopted’
Several writers on the net have spelled the form adopped:
My Adopped Cousin Keeps Trying To Have Sex With Me (link)
adopped sister and brother (link)
Are you adopped, are you happy ? (link)
A reanalysis of the phonology of the lexical item, familiar from other cases in the literature.
First fact: all speakers of English have fast or casual speech variants of words ending in C + t/d (like adopt), variants that lack that final stop; the phenomenon is known as final cluster simplification or t/d-deletion, and it has been studied in great detail for many years (many postings on Language Log and this blog on the phenomenon). The process yields [ǝdáp] as a variant of [ǝdápt].
Second fact: some speakers rarely hear the “full” form [ǝdápt] and are insecure spellers, so get little reinforcement from spelling for [ǝdápt] as the basic variant of the verb. In consequence, they take what they hear, [ǝdáp], with no t, as the basic variant of the verb — and its PST and PSP forms will then be [ǝdápɪd], which they will spell as adopped.
Similar reanalyses have been reported for a number of other verbs. This one was new to me, and as far as I can see, it isn’t in the Dictionary of American Regional English.
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