They preserve the existence of words that used to be commonplace before they lost a linguistic Darwinian conflict with other, more popular forms.
Now, Erez Lieberman , Martin Nowak and colleagues from Harvard University are looking at this record to mathematically model how our verbs evolved and how they will change in the future. As the centuries ticked by, the irregular verbs became fewer and far between. The ten most commonly used English verbs — be, have, do, go say, can, will, see, take and get — are all irregular. Lieberman found that this is because irregular verbs are weeded out much more slowly if they are commonly used.
To get by, speakers have to use common verbs correctly. More obscure irregular verbs, however, are less readily learned and more easily forgotten, and their misuse is less frequently corrected. He used the CELEX corpus — a massive online database of modern texts — to work out the frequency of these verbs in modern English. Amazingly, he found that this frequency affects the way that irregular verbs disappear according to a very simple and mathematical formula.
This means that if they are used times less frequently, they will regularise 10 times as fast and if they are used 10, times less frequently, they will regularise times as fast. They have much shorter half-lives of years and for them, regularisation is a more imminent prospect. Which will be next? Read on to find out more. Ready to chat to a member of the Wall Street English team?
An Overview of English Verb Forms Every verb in English can have a base form, an -ing form, a past simple form and a past participle. We use the base form for: the present simple tense. If the moderators put it up, take a look. If you like expressive writing, the more words in your toolkit the better, but they have to be reasonably common, easily recognised, so arcane words are not that helpful.
Because of the history of English, the irregular verbs are the most common. Stan1 Jul But it points to the multitudes of possibilities that languages offers, and as languages reflection, and dialectic with action and thought.
Bumpy languages - and English is one - reflect bumpy histories etc. I think the pluralizing rule could logically go either way - and that is because logically there is no contradiction, simply two methods used to get to the same symbol. Shane Jul Actually this has been tried by presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and probably others yet most people still use through, though, and although instead of thru, tho, and altho.
Congress even forbade Teddy from using gov't funds to implement his reforms. FWIW, I've been using thru, tho, and altho for over 30 years and people still send me corrections! AnWulf Aug Ananymous05 Sep Probably most languages have irregular verbs, certainly the one I've come across have; this is a natural part of language development, and I don't think you can come up with one all-defining reason.
This is what Etymology Online has to say about 'went', for example:. What's more it's a perfectly natural aspect of native-speaker learning that children sort out the main rules first, and then from about the age of four onwards, work out the irregularities. The fact that English has relatively few verb forms maximum 5, and with verbs like 'put' only 3 , and that irregular verbs are amongst the ones we use most often, really stops this from being a problem. You Americans have a saying, after all, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
Much more worrying is the idea that politicians should be involved in deciding the rules of English. It is to the great glory of English that all attempts to foist an Academy on us have failed. And it wouldn't be the 'grammar nazis' who would be protesting; they seem to rather like neat and tidy solutions. It would be ordinary speakers like me, who simply want to continue speaking the natural English we know and love, without interference from pedants, ethnic purists or reformers.
Mess with somebody's language and you're messing with the whole basis of their culture. It's not only English speakers who don't like government interference.
The German spelling reforms of ran into a lot of flak, and it's my understanding that some of the main newspapers have gone back to the old system, or at least a half-way house.
And a French law brought in in or , restricting the use of English in commercial signs etc, had to be redrafted a year later, limiting it to government agencies only. If people want a nice regular language, there's always Esperanto, but most of us prefer a language with a history and a culture, irregular warts and all. Warsaw Will Sep Sorry, one sentence there was badly worded and implied something I didn't mean.
I should have said - ' without interference from pedants, roots purists or top-down reformers'. Dyske - some five years later I bet your daughter has got them sorted now. The next time he comes to bat, the announcer will usually say he flied out. This modern usage of an old verb follows a regular construction: He flies out.
Please take a look at this list of about six hundred regular English verbs. Contrast with the much shorter list of irregular verbs. Although both lists have everyday verbs, it seems that the largest factors are when and through which language they entered Modern English.
I can identify at least one mechanism that contributes to this phenomenon, at least theoretically. A language is continually under pressure from two directions: contraction and analogy.
Contraction happens when we pronounce words quickly or sloppily and some sounds are dropped or fused or mixed up. The latter is not strictly contraction, but you know what I mean. In general I would say paradigms become more irregular when contraction occurs, such as can't versus cannot or guv'ner versus governor.
Analogy is what happens when we change certain forms of a word to more closely resemble a pattern related to another word. Normally, analogy moves in the direction of regularity: a word will acquire a form that more closely resembles a dominant pattern. So, for example, children may say breaked instead of broke. The theory goes that people are more likely to slur over very frequent words, because they are so familiar that they are easily recognised and quickly pronounced. Less frequent words are supposed to be less susceptible to contraction.
On the other hand, people are more likely to temporarily forget that an uncommon word has an irregular form, such as the plural antennae : it is more likely for it to become antennas exclusively than for men to become mans. So contraction and analogy work together, in a way, to produce less regular frequent words and more regular infrequent words.
Of course there are other factors, too, which may work against or alongside these. This is purely my own opinion, but it seems to me that for centuries English has been gradually regularising existing verb forms.
And when new verbs are introduced, they're almost always regularly conjugated. It also seems fairly obvious to me that irregular conjugations learnt at an early age will tend to be preserved. For example, in later life, I'm sure I read learned more often than learnt in contexts like the previous sentence, but that hasn't significantly affected my usage.
It's important to note that I personally don't feel threatened by the possibility that my use of English might be considered non-standard or uneducated. Children soon notice how regular verbs work, so they naturally generate "incorrect" past tense forms such as eated, taked, rided.
Obviously with less common verbs, firstly the child is less likely to use them, and secondly there's a greater chance that the parents aren't familiar with the "correct" but irregular forms.
So they get corrected less often, and with the passage of generations, the irregular forms can gradually die out. Thus it seems only natural that the most tenaciously-preserved irregular forms will mostly be very common verbs learnt in early childhood.
Old habits die hard , and all that. One answer is that it might be easier to learn verbs where distinct meanings correspond to distinct form, e.
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