Most irregular!
How come we don't slap '-ed' onto the past tense of every verb? Because history.
Ever wondered what the 12 most common verbs in English are? Of course you have. But before I tell you, see if you can notice something peculiar about them.
In descending order of frequency, they are be, have, do, say, get, make, go, know, take, see, come, think.
Did you see it? They’re all irregular verbs. That is, verbs whose past tense is formed not by plonking -ed onto their butt, as you do with the vast majority of verbs, but by changing their internal vowel structure.
How that structure changes can vary – there’s say-said, for example, but know-knew – and there’s no obvious rule to tell you what the change will be in each case. That’s why they’re called irregular and why you just have to learn each one off by heart.
(As an aside, you had it pretty much worked out by the time you were five, which I think is simply phenomenal. You should be mighty proud of yourself.)
Now given that the vast majority of verbs are regular (about 97% by one account), the fact that the 12 most common are all irregular is surely no coincidence, right?
Right!
So come with me now on a journey into Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon). For any time you utter an irregular verb, you’re borrowing from English as she was spoke then. And at that time, the verb you’re using wasn’t irregular at all.
Old English was spoken for about 700 years from the fifth century. It had two main verb types, called strong and weak.
Weak verbs’ past tense was formed by adding -d (sometimes -ed and sometimes -de) at the end. For reasons I haven’t discovered (code for “I haven’t bothered to look it up”), the -ed we all know today has become universal. In Old English, weak verbs accounted for about 75% of the total.
Strong verbs, on the other hand, had seven different ways of forming the past tense. In each case, it was done by changing the internal vowel structure as in say/said. While seven may seem a lot, compared to the total number of verbs in English it’s a drop in the ocean.
So rather than having irregular verbs, you could say Old English had eight different kinds of regular verb.
But around 1000 years ago, each time a new verb was introduced to the language it would conform almost universally to the -ed rule. One by one, existing non -ed verbs began to fall in line too. As a result, fully 97% of verbs today take the -ed suffix to form the past tense.
That leaves about 200 holdouts. Like the wizened owner of a tumbledown house who refuses to move and make room for the new motorway, they’re grimly holding their ground.
What’s so special about them? Oddly enough, it’s their non-specialness that has them resist change.
The theory among linguists is that when you use a word often, it’s harder to change the way you use it. So while the Old English helpan-healp has become help-helped, the more common tacan-tok remains with us today as the doggedly irregular take-took. (And it surely says something about human nature that help would be less common than take, but let’s not get all moral here.)
Even now, you may still spot the drift to -ed endings at play. Today I saw seeked used in a news article instead of sought. At first I was horrified. Now I’m merely shocked, but too bad for me. The pull for consistency is strong, and no amount of wailing and gnashing of my remaining teeth will change that.
That said, regular verbs don’t have it all their own way. For centuries, the past tense of sneak was sneaked. In the 1800s, people started saying snuck, and as the Google Ngram below shows, that usage looks set to overtake sneaked in the near future - at least in the US.
“Go, you rebels!” I say.
There’s another reason to not feel too sorry for irregular verbs. While they account for only 3% of the total, it’s estimated that about 70% of the time we use a verb, it’s an irregular one. According to linguist Steven Pinker, “eighty irregulars are common enough that children use them before they learn to read, and I predict they will stay in the language indefinitely.”
Personally, I wouldn’t bet against him.
Whatever the future, there’s surely something worth celebrating here. A piece of history dating back a millennium or so is still unfolding, and you and I are part of it. Not only that, but unlike so much of human history, this is the kind where nobody gets hurt – or has ever got hurted for that matter.
Bits and specious
When you discuss a complex subject in a few hundred words, you’ll inevitably misrepresent it to some degree. In this week’s issue, I’ve talked about Old English like it was a single, homogeneous language. In fact, just like modern English, it had different dialects (Northumbrian, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish) and, like modern English, it evolved over time. Many of the variations between dialects have been carried over into modern English. So if you have trouble understanding your pals from Newcastle (and honestly, who doesn’t?), blame those Northumbrians. They always were trouble.
Also, the list the 12 most common irregular verbs varies depending on the source. But the variations are minor.
Ready to have your mind blown? There exists an actual voice recording of one human being born in the 18th century - that is, the century that began in 1700 (or 1701 if you’re a pedant). His name is Helmuth von Moltke and you can listen to him (speaking German) here.
Those vertical icons you see (¶) when you switch on the typographical marks on your Word document are called pilcrows. The word is from the Ancient Greek παράγραφος (parágraphos), literally, “written on the side or margin”.
On that note, here’s a useful rule of thumb: If you need to switch on the pilcrows, formatting your document will take twice as long as it took you to write it.
Quote of the week
You wouldn’t believe the hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.
Steven Pinker