The Future of Language
Harvard mathematicians have come up with a formula that will help predict the future of language evolution. It is, in short:
“Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language.”
Got that? What it boils down to is thinking of linguistic development in terms of evolution: ” 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.”
Their research is based on seven of the verb conjugation rules of Old English – only one of which is still used today.
They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an “-ed” suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.
In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.
To develop this formula, the researchers tracked the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English through linguistic changes in Middle English and then modern English. Of these 177 verbs that were irregular 1,200 years ago, 145 stayed irregular in Middle English and just 98 remain irregular today, following the regularization over the centuries of such verbs as help, laugh, reach, walk, and work.
Don’t ask me. I almost failed Calculus.
