I heard an interview with one of the investigators today on NPR. Utterly fascinating. Irregular past tenses persist proportionally to how common the words are. Uncommon irregular past tenses, like ‘stank’, are predicted to disappear sooner. In around five hundred years, the investigators predict, we will be saying ‘it stinked’ instead. In most languages, the past tenses of the most frequently used verbs — to be, to do, to go, to take, etc. — have remained irregular and will probably continue to do so. A related phenomenon is that other common words are very resistant to change, so, for example, the word for the number ‘two’ is very similar to that in other languages descended from proto-Indo-European, while less common words diverge more. The interviewer asked the simplest but surely the most profound question, to which the investigator being interviewed conceded they indeed have no answer — why do languages change at all?
The future of the past tense
Mathematical model for language evolution advances: “Writing this week in the journal Nature, Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, and colleagues in Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by Martin A. Nowak, conceive of linguistic development as an essentially evolutionary scheme: Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words — specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an ‘-ed’ ending in the past tense — are subject to powerful pressure to ‘regularize’ as the language develops.”
