Irregular verbs (those that for instance do not take the -ed suffix for the past tense) have long been the bane of students - especially English-as-second-language students. Not surprisingly, these verbs go back to the very beginnings of the language.
Not Exactly Rocket Science takes up the story:
Today, the majority of English verbs take the suffix '-ed' in their past tense versions. Sitting alongside these regular verbs like 'talked' or 'typed' are irregular ones that obey more antiquated rules (like 'sang/sung' or 'drank/drunk') or obey no rules at all (like 'went' and 'had')...
Today, less than ["fewer than?"] 3% of verbs are irregular but they wield a disproportionate power. 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...
Lieberman charted the progress of 177 irregular verbs from the 9th century Old English of Beowulf, to the 13th century Middle English of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to the modern 21st century English of Harry Potter. Today, only 98 of these are still irregular; many formerly irregular verbs such as 'laugh' and 'help' have put on new regular guises...
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...
Basically, irregular verbs that are used frequently (be, have, go, say) will stay irregular. Those that are used less frequently have a tendency to morph from the traditional irregular form to new "conventional" forms. Thus the past tenses of "dive" (dove) and "tread" (trod) are being replaced by "dived" and "treaded."
Which will be next? Lieberman has his speculative sights set on 'wed'. It is one of the least commonly used of modern irregular verbs and the past form 'wed' will soon be replaced with 'wedded'.
Interesting.
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