How the irregular verb is being 'drived' to extinction

How the irregular verb is being 'drived' to extinction

By DAVID DERBYSHIRE
11th October 2007
Daily Mail


Is the languague of Shakespeare, with its rich and varied irregular verbs, heading for extinction?
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The process beginned hundreds of years ago and bringed a huge change in our use of the language.

Now researchers believe more of the irregular verbs that make English such a rich and varied experience are heading for extinction.

In future, 'stank' will evolve into 'stinked', 'drove' will become 'drived' and 'slew' will turn into 'slayed', a team of linguists and mathematicians say. And if the simplification becomes really serious, 'begun' could change to 'beginned', 'brought' to 'bringed' and 'fell' to 'falled'.

The prediction comes from the first study of its kind into how irregular verbs have evolved in literature over the last 1,200 years.

Around 97 per cent of verbs in English are regular. That means in the past tense they simply take an '-ed' ending – so 'talk' becomes 'talked', and 'jump' becomes 'jumped'.

Irregular verbs, however, do their own thing. Some like 'wed' stay the same in the past tense while others like 'begin' take a different ending to become 'begun'.

The study, carried out at Harvard University, found that irregular verbs are under intense pressure to change into regular verbs as language develops.

The team identified 177 irregular verbs used in Old English and tracked their use over the centuries from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf to the latest Harry Potter novel.

By the 14th century, only 145 were still irregular and by modern times, just 98 remained.

The less commonly used they are, the more they are likely to change, the team reports today in the journal Nature. The scientists predict that 15 of the 98 irregular verbs in the study will have evolved into regular verbs within the next 500 years. Verbs that they say are very likely to change are: bade to bidded; shed – shedded; slew – slayed; slit – slitted; stung – stinged; wed – wedded.

Verbs that are less likely to change are: broke – breaked; bought – buyed; chose – choosed; drew – drawed; drunk – drinked; ate – eated.

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I do believe it is a common issue. I work with teens and am a parent. I listen to the talk of the teens (granted they are in placement for a reason), listen to the students I am in college with and then talk to my children. I have a feeling that English is not being taught as stringently as it once was. I do fear that we parents are also partially to blame. I know that my mother was a real stickler on English and proper usage. Good for me a it has allowed me to at least sound intelligent. Bad in another way was most people believe I have an accent despite the fact that I have lived in the same region of the US for most of my life (ok, I did a brief stint in the Southwest with the Spanglish that is spoken there, midwesterners do sound completely different). Many times I am accused of being from Boston (never been there but hear it is nice to visit) or from another country (where more proper English is spoken). For me I just laugh it off and insist that my own children use correct speech. The children I work with are a little more difficult as it is a multicultural facility and hence the first language they learned is not always English. It is a bit more difficult to integrate Mexican (yes there are differences as my grandmother-in-law will point out since she is from Puerto Rico), Native American, Ubonics (no you can't ax me a question), and proper English. I do also believe that some of the issue is the proliference of texting and using computers. After all, I have never been a very good speller but the computer has made me even more lazy. And if one takes documents from MicroSoft and places them in Word one gets tons of errors both grammatically as well as spelling. Perhaps it is time we take English back and start again.

This type of event has occurred in the past, where English writers attempted to slip in preterites such as 'knowed' and 'blowed' into the language. However, most of the strong verbs retained their vitality; others, such as ache/oke/achen and help/holp/holpen went the way of the dinosaurs. (holp & holpen are still in dialectal use)

Still others preserved partially their irregular (strong) qualities in the past participle, especially when used as an adjective as in (mis)shapen, (un)washen, (be)holden, shorn, sewn, hewn, mown, (un)shaven, etc.

More recent shifts in the opposite direction (weak/regular to irregular) are dig/dug/dug, strive/strove/striven, dive/dove/[dived] (partial irreg), wear/wore/worn, hide/[hid]/hidden (partial), etc. These were either weak verbs in Old English or were borrowed from other languages (here, Anglo-French and Norman)

interesting is the word 'thrive'. It's rare to never that one hears the forms thrive/throve/thriven anymore...sad