Are the most popular English words ‘fossils’?
Published in · 3 min read · Dec 18, 2019
--
The ten most heavily used verbs in the English language are be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get.
The linguistic feature all these words share is that they are irregular. Unlike the vast majority of verbs in English, they do not follow a standard inflection pattern: I paint, I painted, he painted etc.
There are around 180 irregular verbs in English — a small fraction of the many thousands of regular ones. Irregulars punch way above their weight, making up 70% of the verbs in everyday use.
So how have these tricky customers evolved? And why are they so central to English?
Fossils
The psychologist, Steven Pinker, has an interesting theory. He says that irregular verbs are “fossils of an Indo-European pre-historic language.” This had a regular rule in which one vowel replaced another.
Over time pronunciation changed. The “rules became opaque to children and eventually died; the irregular past tense forms are their fossils.”
Mistakes?
Irregular verbs are notoriously difficult for language learners — native speakers struggle with them, too. Young children logically reach for ‘speaked’ rather than ‘spoke’. Older ones sometimes struggle to remember that nobody ever ‘writ’ anything.
Common usage eventually corrects many anomalies, especially where they are likely to confuse meaning. Native speakers are highly unlikely to say ‘droved’ after primary school. Some deviations from the standard form do survive, however, particularly in local dialects.
Most linguists look at language from a descriptive rather than a prescriptive perspective — listen here for difference. Descriptivists argue that many apparent ‘mistakes’ made by native speakers -‘we was’, ‘they done’ — are adaptations of irregular verbs. So while a Londoner might say ‘I would have went to the cinema’ they would not break the structural rules of the language by putting the noun before the adjective — as in ‘the train red’.
Decline
The number of commonly used irregular verbs is declining. Some die of natural causes. Most modern children don’t know the word ‘cleave’ or that its past is ‘clove’. Nor are they likely to come across ‘abide’/’abode’. Other irregulars like ‘dream’ and ‘learn’ are gradually becoming regular. How long can ‘dreamt’ survive alongside ‘dreamed’?
As English becomes ever more international, the simpler verb forms become more dominant. Despite this, there is no danger of irregular verbs disappearing. Even before they learn to read most children can use 80 irregulars. They may not realise that ‘went’ originally came from ‘wend’ but nobody over the age of six seriously tries to replace it with ‘goed’.
The future is less promising for new irregular verbs. All new verbs in English are regular, including all new noun conversions: ‘I accessed’, ‘you emailed’. Even when an old verb takes a new meaning it uses a regular pattern — the army officer ‘rung’ his general but his men ‘ringed’ the city.
For a new irregular verb to survive it must offer some familiar pattern in how it works. One of the most recent irregulars is ‘sneak’/’snuck’, which you find in American English. In Britain we prefer ‘sneaked’ but ‘snuck’ is also logical because it follows the pattern of ‘strike’/’struck’.
This has been adapted from my post for the Oxford University Press English Language Teaching Global Blog
