"The verbs in English are a fright."

topic of the day 060 & video of the day 053

why some words get forgotted?

It's Okay to be Smart

Irregular Verbs

"People like pizza more than hamburgers, but less than ice cream."

Most verbs in English are 'regular' whereby we make their past tense by adding a letter or two on the end i.e. happen and happened.

Irregular is just like the difference between what is and what was.

A biologist studies how things are by looking at how they used to be i.e. fossils.

Finding the fossils of language is easy since people tend to write them down in books.

A concordance, an index of words that lists every instance of every word in a written work. Using this type of book can highlight the usage of certain words by specific writers such as woods are being used more than forest in Thoreau's Walden.

This phenomenon of ranked lists of written language make linguist George Kingsley Zipf notice that not all words are created equal. Only a few words are very common, while most words are very uncommon, between the and where for example. Using Ulysses for reference, the tenth most frequently used word is ten time more common than the hundredth. This peculiar trend is called Zipf's Law. 

Everything in language obeys Zipf's Law ... everything except irregular verbs.

The twelve most common verbs in the English language are be, have, do, say, get, make, go, know, take, see, come and think. All irregular, but English only has around two hundred irregular verbs, a mere three percent of all verbs. Almost all irregular verbs are common and almost none are rare, unlike how Zipf's Law predicted.

Where do they came from? They're the oldest ones we have.

Around four to six thousand years ago, people stretching from Europe to Western Asia spoke an ancient language known as Proto-Indo-European or PIE for short, the origin of staggering amount of modern languages. In PIE, the meaning and tense of words could be changed through a system where vowel sounds were swapped. This system, the ablaut, can still be heard today in irregular verbs: dig, dug, sing, sang, sung.

At the time, it was the one of the many competing systems for changing verbs, but a while later people speaking Photo-Germanic, a dialect descended from PIE, began adding verbs to the language that didn't fit these old patterns, so they invented a new way of signifying past tense by adding "-t" or "-ed" sounds to the end. Back then, these 'regular' verbs were actually the exception.

As English grew from this PG language, newly added words became automatically regular by following this new rule. And many older verbs began to switch from the old way to the new i.e. from slew to slayed. Three out of four verbs had been 'regularized' when Beowulf was written around 700-1000 CE. They were a handful of verbs that moved in the other direction as well.

For every haved and maked that was had and made, there are dozens of verbs like holp that got helped. Now regular is not the exception but the rule.

So, why did some irregular verbs go extinct, while others have survived?

Researchers tracked the evolution of 177 verbs that were irregular around 800 CE and by 1100 CE, 32 of these had become regular. By the time we hit modern English, 79 had regularized.

The trait that predicted whether or not a verb would become regular was how often we use it.

The most frequently used verbs tend to stay irregular. The most rarely used become regular.

There was a sort of Zipfian pattern there after all.

If a verb is used a hundred times less frequently, it will regularize ten times as fast.

Researchers were able to estimate the likely lifespan of irregular verbs. Word like stink for example that's used every 10,000-100,000 words has a 50% chance of regularizing within seven hundred years.

Usage frequency affects a word's survival.

Regular verbs follow a rule.

When we encounter a word we don't know, we can still figure out its past tense, without memorizing each and every one. Irregular verbs on the other hand have to be memorized. If we don't use them, we lose them.

The Google Ngram Viewer is a modern search tool we can use to study how human culture has changed over the centuries, like how we can see when people stopped talking about the Great War and started to call it World War One and when evolution was on the decline until DNA came along. 

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