Hey there, curious minds! Have you ever wondered why English can be so confusing sometimes? Let’s dive into the world of words and discover some fascinating facts about how our language works.
English verbs can be tricky. Most verbs are “regular,” meaning we change them to the past tense by adding a simple ending like “-ed.” For example, “walk” becomes “walked.” But then there are irregular verbs, which don’t follow this pattern. Instead of “breaked,” we say “broke.” Why? It’s just how the language evolved over time.
Irregular verbs are like the rebels of the language world. They don’t follow the rules, and that’s what makes them interesting. But where did they come from? To find out, we need to look back in time.
Thousands of years ago, people in Europe and Western Asia spoke a language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). This ancient language had a unique way of changing verbs by swapping vowel sounds. This system, known as “ablaut,” is still present in some irregular verbs today, like “sing,” “sang,” “sung.”
As languages evolved, new verbs were added that didn’t fit the old patterns. So, people created a new way to form the past tense by adding “-t” or “-ed.” Over time, these “regular” verbs became the norm, while irregular verbs remained as a small but significant group.
Have you ever noticed that some words are used way more often than others? This is explained by Zipf’s Law, which states that in any language, a few words are extremely common, while most are rarely used. For example, words like “the” and “is” appear frequently, while words like “hallux” (your big toe) are seldom used.
Interestingly, irregular verbs don’t follow Zipf’s Law. Most of them are common, and very few are rare. This makes them an exception to the rule, adding another layer of intrigue to our language.
Language changes over time, much like living organisms. Researchers have studied how verbs have evolved by examining ancient texts and databases. They found that the most frequently used irregular verbs tend to stay irregular, while less common ones become regular over time.
This process is similar to natural selection. If a verb isn’t used often, it might “regularize” and follow the standard pattern. For example, the verb “wed” might soon become “wedded” in the past tense.
Today, we have powerful tools like the Google Ngram Viewer, which lets us explore how language has changed over centuries. By analyzing millions of digitized books, we can see trends in word usage and cultural shifts. For instance, we can track when people started calling the Great War “World War I” or how the popularity of “pizza” compares to “ice cream.”
These tools give us a glimpse into the vast world of language, but they can’t tell us the whole story. That’s where our curiosity comes in. Keep exploring and stay curious about the fascinating world of words!
Explore your favorite books or online articles to find examples of irregular verbs. Make a list of at least 10 irregular verbs you discover. Then, write a short story using all of them. This will help you understand how these verbs are used in context.
Research the Proto-Indo-European language and create a poster or digital presentation that explains its significance in the development of modern languages. Include examples of how PIE influenced English irregular verbs.
Use an online text analyzer to examine the frequency of words in a short story or article. Identify the most common words and discuss how they align with Zipf’s Law. Reflect on why certain irregular verbs might defy this pattern.
Create a timeline that shows the evolution of the English language, highlighting key changes in verb forms. Include examples of verbs that have regularized over time and discuss why this might have happened.
Use the Google Ngram Viewer to investigate the usage trends of a few irregular verbs over the past centuries. Present your findings in a report or presentation, and speculate on cultural or historical events that might have influenced these trends.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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Hey smart people, Joe here. In your whole life, how many books have you read? Sorry, I mean read, not red like the color. I just misspoke! This reminds me of a poem:
The verbs in English are a fright.
How can we learn to read and write?
Today we write, but first we wrote;
We bite our tongues, but never bote.
This tale I tell; this tale I told;
I smell the flowers, but never smold.
If I still do as once I did,
Then do cows moo, as they once did?
That was penned by linguist Richard Lederer, and it’s proof that English is… weird. We can blame all this confusion on irregular verbs. Most verbs in English are “regular.” We make their past tense by adding a letter or two at the end. They show the difference between what happens now and what happened. But irregular verbs are… well, not regular. Like the difference between what is and what was.
It’s cute when kids say “I breaked my toy.” But why do the rest of us say “broke”? Because that’s just what everyone else says, right? We say it how it’s always been said. But if we were thinking scientifically, we’d ask, “How did it get this way?” And I prefer to think scientifically.
A biologist studies how things are by looking at how they used to be. We find fossils. But how does one go about finding a fossil of language? Luckily, people tend to write language down. James Joyce’s *Ulysses* contains 265,222 words. Of those words, the word “time” is the 74th most frequent, used 376 times. The word “the” is the most frequently used: 14,877 times. We know that thanks to another type of book: a “concordance,” an index of words that lists every instance of every word in a written work. There are concordances for Thoreau’s *Walden*, the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, the writings of Descartes (in the original French), medieval recipes, and even for the Bible.
A linguist named George Kingsley Zipf looked at these ranked lists of written language and noticed something interesting: Not all words are created equal. Some get used a lot, while most almost never get used. For example, we say “the” all the time, but almost never say “hallux” – the anatomical name for your big toe.
When it comes to a trait like height, most people are pretty close to average, while the very tallest people are only maybe three times taller than the shortest. Height is… normal; it’s literally a “normal distribution.” But Zipf realized words aren’t normal. Only a few words are very common, while most words are very uncommon. For instance, in *Ulysses*, there are a thousand words used more than 26 times, a hundred words used more than 265 times, but only ten words used more than 2,653 times. Another way to say this: the 10th most frequently used word is ten times more common than the 100th most used.
This peculiar trend is called Zipf’s Law.
What the… I’m Tacky! It looks like you’re talking about Zipf’s Law. Did you know Vsauce already did a video about that? Yeah, it’s a great video… it’s actually what got me thinking about this! But I want to tell them more than just about Zipf’s Law.
Would you like me to help you click over to that video? No! I want you to watch THIS video. But if you DID watch Michael’s video on Vsauce, perhaps by clicking a link in the description – LATER – you’d learn that Zipf’s Law applies to tons of stuff: like wealth, the population of cities, how long audiences clap, web traffic, the size of holes in Swiss cheese, and – especially – language. Wherever people look, newspapers, other languages, even randomly generated words, pretty much everything in language obeys Zipf’s Law… well, everything except irregular verbs.
The 12 most common verbs in the English language are be, have, do, say, get, make, go, know, take, see, come, and think. All irregular. But irregulars are a tiny fraction of all verbs. English only has around 200 irregular verbs, a mere 3 percent of total verbs. Instead of having a few commonly used irregular verbs and lots of rare ones, like Zipf’s Law predicts, almost all irregular verbs are common, and almost none are rare. Irregular verbs… are a Zipf exception.
Where do irregular verbs come from? They’re the oldest ones we have. Around four to six thousand years ago, people stretching from Europe to Western Asia spoke an ancient language known as Proto-Indo-European. A staggering number of modern languages descend from this. In PIE, the meaning and tense of words could be changed through a system where vowel sounds were swapped. This system, the ablaut, can still be heard today in irregular verbs: dig, dug; sing, sang, sung.
At the time, it was just one of many competing systems for changing verbs. But later, people speaking Proto-Germanic, a dialect descended from PIE, began adding verbs to the language that didn’t fit these old patterns, so they invented a new way of signifying the past tense by simply adding “-t” or “-ed” sounds to the end. Back then, these new “regular” verbs were actually the exception. As English grew from this Proto-Germanic language, newly added words became automatically regular; they followed this new rule. And many older verbs began to switch from the old way to the new. Like how long ago, the knight slew the dragon, but Beyoncé slayed at her last show.
By the time the Old English story of *Beowulf* was written, three out of every four verbs had been “regularized.” There were a handful of verbs that moved in the other direction, going from regular to irregular, but for every “had” or “made” that was had or made, there are dozens of verbs like “holp” that got helped along. Regular was no longer the exception; it was the rule.
So why did some irregular verbs go extinct, while others have survived? We all know that language evolves, similar to how living things do, changing slightly over time. Could language also undergo some kind of natural selection? Is there something about a word that decides whether it’s strong enough to live on? We can test this! We just need a bigger data set than one book.
Using ancient grammar textbooks along with databases of millions of written words, researchers tracked the evolution of 177 verbs that were irregular at the time *Beowulf* was written. By the time Chaucer wrote *Canterbury Tales*, 32 of these had become regular. By the time we hit modern English, 79 had regularized. The trait that predicted whether or not a verb would become regular was how often we use it. The most frequently used verbs tend to stay irregular. The most rarely used become regular.
Surprisingly, there was a sort of hidden Zipfian pattern there after all. If a verb is used 100 times less frequently, it will regularize 10 times as fast. If they’re used 10,000 times less frequently, they’ll regularize 100 times as fast. Researchers were able to estimate the likely lifespan of irregular verbs. A word like “stink,” that’s used once every 10,000-100,000 words, has a 50% chance of regularizing within 700 years. “Drink,” a more common word, will take more like 5,000 years. We can find words today in the process of going extinct. Do you tend to say “dived” or “dove”? Now is your last chance to be “newly wed.” Pretty soon, you might be “newly wedded.” “Wed” is the irregular verb we think will most likely disappear next.
This seems to be natural selection for language. Usage frequency affects a word’s survival, and this makes sense. Regular verbs follow a rule. When we encounter a word we don’t know, we can still figure out its past tense without memorizing each and every one. Irregular verbs, on the other hand, have to be memorized. If we don’t use them, we lose them. As they’re slowly forgotten, the “regular” rule is used in their place.
In 1980, after thirty years of work, IBM was able to digitize the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. Today, this is something that you or anyone who knows how to code can do in a few minutes, with a few keystrokes. Concordances, the indexes of language that inspired Zipf and others to ask these questions, no one really writes those anymore. Except… maybe they do. It’s called “Google.” A search engine is basically a list of words and phrases from around the web, and the pages where they appear. Concordances were just analog Google.
The Google Books project now contains 25 million scanned books stretching back more than 500 years. No matter how many books you read, you could never read every book, or even a fraction of them, in a lifetime. If you tried to read just the English-language books from the year 2000 in this collection, at a reasonable pace, without stopping, it would take you 80 years.
But what could we learn if we made computers read for us? The Google Ngram Viewer is a search tool we can use to study how human culture has changed over the centuries. It plots the frequency of strings of one or more words, by year, found in those millions of digitized books. We can see when people stopped talking about the Great War and started calling it World War I instead. “Evolution” was on the decline until “DNA” came along. Einstein took physics to the next level. People like pizza more than hamburgers, but less than ice cream.
What’s the most interesting one you can find? Of course, as much data as we can pull from millions of digitized books, we haven’t read them. A computer has. And while it gives us access to an immense amount of data, it doesn’t tell us perhaps the most important part: the story. Stay curious.
If you thought that Ngram was pretty cool, Sarah over at Art Assignment used it to look at how different artists got famous… or not. Link in the description to that one too.
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This version maintains the content while removing any informal or potentially inappropriate language.
English – The language primarily spoken in the United Kingdom, the United States, and many other countries around the world. – Example sentence: English is often considered a global language due to its widespread use in international communication.
Linguistics – The scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of grammar, syntax, and phonetics. – Example sentence: In our linguistics class, we learned how different languages have unique sound systems.
Verbs – Words that describe an action, state, or occurrence, and form the main part of the predicate of a sentence. – Example sentence: In English, verbs change form to indicate tense, such as “walk” becoming “walked” in the past tense.
Irregular – Not following the normal rules or patterns, especially in grammar. – Example sentence: The verb “go” is irregular because its past tense form is “went,” which doesn’t follow the usual pattern of adding “-ed.”
Language – A system of communication used by a particular community or country, consisting of spoken, written, or signed words. – Example sentence: Language allows us to express our thoughts and emotions to others.
Patterns – Regular and repeated ways in which something happens or is done, especially in language. – Example sentence: Linguists study patterns in language to understand how people communicate.
Evolution – The gradual development or change of something over time, such as a language. – Example sentence: The evolution of language can be seen in how English has borrowed words from other languages.
Technology – The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry, which can also influence language use. – Example sentence: Technology has introduced new words into our language, like “selfie” and “hashtag.”
Words – Units of language that have meaning and can be spoken or written. – Example sentence: Words are the building blocks of sentences and help us convey ideas.
Curiosity – A strong desire to know or learn something, often driving language exploration and learning. – Example sentence: Her curiosity about different cultures led her to study several foreign languages.
