October 10, 2007
PEPPERED VERBS:
Verbs have a 'half-life,' researchers find: They discover that irregular verbs change in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms. (Denise Gellene, October 11, 2007, Los Angeles Times)
Tracing the evolution of English verbs over 1,200 years -- from the Old English of "Beowulf" to the modern English of "The Princess Diaries" -- researchers have found that the majority of irregular verbs have gone the way of Grendel, felled by the linguistic equivalent of natural selection.The irregular verbs, governed by confusing and antiquated rules, came under evolutionary pressure to obey the modern "-ed" rule of regular verb conjugation, according to a report today in the journal Nature.
That the English language has undergone dramatic change over a millennium will come as no surprise to generations of high school students who have struggled to decipher "Beowulf," which dates from the 9th century, or Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," written about 1200.
Linguists have constructed elaborate "family trees" showing how language has morphed over time, but have been unable to detect the principle governing such changes.
The researchers, led by Martin A. Nowak, an evolutionary theorist at Harvard University, discovered that irregular verbs evolve in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms. Analyzing databases containing millions of words, Nowak and colleagues showed that the patterns of change depended on how often irregular verb forms were used.
Infrequently used irregular verbs were quickest to evolve. For instance, "holp," the past tense of "help," became the modern "helped." Similarly, "chode" became "chided" and "swole" became "swelled." [...]
Coauthor and Harvard graduate student Jean-Baptiste Michel said irregular verbs were like fossils that could reveal how linguistic rules -- and perhaps cultural rules -- were born and then died.The research brings the field of linguistics, which inspired Charles Darwin as he pondered biological evolution, full circle, said W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews in Britain, who wrote a commentary accompanying the report. [...]
If the trend toward "regularization" continues -- and researchers believe it will -- just 83 of the 177 irregular verbs studied will remain in the year 2500.
Some irregular verbs are so embedded in everyday language that they will never regularize, researchers said. Although less than 3% of modern verbs are irregular, the 10 most common verbs (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are irregular, researchers said. They calculated the half-lives of "be" and "have" at 38,800 years, making them the least mutable of the irregular verbs.
Which irregular verb will next take an -ed? Researchers predict it will be "wed," which, they say, is already being replaced in some contexts by "wedded."
"Now is your last chance to be a newly wed," researchers wrote. "The married couples of the future can only hope for 'wedded' bliss."
Just as nothing speciates, they just remain verbs. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 10, 2007 10:25 PM
One of their examples, "swole," persists in usage, though it's now generally deprecated and used mainly by the less educated. It has new life as describing people who have engaged in bodybuilding.
Posted by: John Thacker at October 10, 2007 10:55 PMThough President Clinton was known to use "swole up," as seen here.
Posted by: John Thacker at October 10, 2007 10:56 PMOne of the pressures on regularizing verbs is the still increasing number of people who use English as their "at work" language, or as a "neutral" language without any cultural favoratism (see India). They have no need for literary subtleties, but unambiguousness and ease of use. And having only regular verbs fits in with English having already lost declensions and gender and "voice" and all those other unnecessary complications. (It's also about the only language to use the Latin alphabet that doesn't use diacritical marks (unless you are being pretentious with foreign names and words).)
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at October 10, 2007 11:20 PMGenes and living organisms evolve?
They evolve predictably?
I'd like to see me one of them there predictions.
Posted by: Ibid at October 11, 2007 8:01 AMNote that the evolution in question is Intelligent Design.
Posted by: oj at October 11, 2007 10:17 AMI was about to say the same thing about "Swole". Heard it regularly throughout my youth: "That bee stung 'im, and his arm swole up THIS big!!!"
Sometimes, you would get the combo with "ed": "My knee swoled up after football practice."
Posted by: Twn at October 11, 2007 10:32 AMOne of the great things about using/reading the KJV is constant immersion in this sort of wording. "... hath holpen his servant Israel...". One of the downsides is reading Paul in the old language. :-)
Posted by: Jorge Curioso at October 11, 2007 1:02 PMA bit late here.
Of course evolutioary linguistics is Spencerian , not Darwinian. Language is a folkway which compete with other folkways for a place in the sun.
The efficiency of the language as a medium of intellectual exchange and a store of knowledge are high among the factors favoring its shouldering aside of less useful tongues. How well does the language sustain and advance winning ways? Does it favor and promote victory? Do others adopt it willingly for its advantages? Do its bearers carry its books of Scripture in their wagon trains?
How well does it handle science and industry, law and government? Does it readily convey concepts such as responsibility and causation--not every language does.
Now take this analysis to the instant discussion of linguistic change. Contrary to the pathetic fallacy pushed in contemporary literature on the subject, vulgarization and simplification of speech is not necessarily a desirable end. Those who do not comprehend subtilities of tense, mood, person, voice and all that are disadvantaged relative to those whose minds are more clear about these categories.
Languages do change over time, of course. We see it about us constantly. We can trace the changes in our memories, or ponder them is resources such as the OED. We can test the changes in out speech and writing, employing words which carry archaic shades of meaning hidden from the churlish.
Resistance to runaway change is part of the strength of a language. The formal institutions which anchor words--schools, dictionaries, great literature, Sacred Scripture--operate to preserve language from collapsing into the useless chaos of a modern Babel.
Posted by: Lou Gots at October 11, 2007 7:54 PM