As the centuries ticked by, the irregular verbs became fewer and far between. In the Old English of Beowulf, seven different rules competed for governance of English verbs, and only about 75% followed the “-ed” rule.
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, the majority of English verbs take the suffix ‘-ed’ in their past tense versions. 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. They preserve the existence of words that used to be commonplace before they lost a linguistic Darwinian conflict with other, more popular forms. In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language’s version of the fossil record. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I’ll return with fresh material.įor decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.