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Why Do We Have Irregular Verbs?
Little kids have the right idea. At a certain point in their language development they make
mistakes that, when you think about it, are perfectly reasonable, in fact, a lot more
reasonable than the messy, irregular system they're supposed to be acquiring.
But eventually they grow up and fall into line with the rest of us and learn that some
verbs don't fit the expected pattern.
Why are there verbs that don't fit the expected pattern? Why do we even have irregular verbs?
If you take a look at the history of English, most of the irregular verbs we have used to
be regular, which is to say, the rule for making the past tense used to be different.
The rule used to be to change the vowel.
So in Old English a word like ride became rode, and other words like it followed the
same pattern
There were a actually few different vowel change rules, but based on the form of the
root word you could tell which rule to use for the past tense form.
Some of the products of these rules survived into Modern English but many of them didn't
survive.
So what happened?
Well there was one other past tense rule in Old English for words like lufian, to love,
which changed the ending of the word to a d sound. That rule is the origin of the past
tense suffix we know today. For some reason in the Middle English period starting around
1100 A.D., it spread and eventually forced out the other patterns.
But some verbs resisted the spread of this pattern and they became the irregular verbs
we know today. They became irregular because the world changed around them while they refused
to change.
Why did certain verbs resist the change? If you take a look at the irregular verbs in
English, they happen to be some of the ones we use the most. Because we used them so frequently,
their forms were reinforced over and over again giving them strength to withstand the
changes around them. Less frequent words didn't get their forms reinforced enough to resist.
Even today, while some words like dream, kneel, and leap show some wavering between regular
and irregular patterns the really frequently used ones like sleep, leave, and feel resist
regularization. And the really, really frequently used verbs,
like to be'? They tend the be the most irregular of all, and they echo back to even older patterns
and ancient historical changes.
Of course, this is a simplified account of a complicated story. Sometimes old past tense
forms can survive even if they aren't frequent at all, but because they belong to particularly
notable domain of use
And the pressure to change isn't all one way, from irregular to regular. Had and made were
once haved and maked. Sometimes when a regular verb is very frequently used, it can lose
some sounds, making it become irregular. Why keep pronouncing those extra consonants if
you don't really need them? Had and made are good enough.
Likewise, why put that extra syllable in hitted, cutted, shutted when they already end in a
sound that's close enough to the past tense suffix?
Every act of language use involves a mix of enforcing old habits, applying rules to new
situations, and economizing effort. The proportion of the mix is subject to varying priorities
and is always changing. It may not make for a very orderly product, but it does the job
we need it to do.
English
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