Interesting article on the future evolution of English.

So, essentially they're saying WRT irregular verb past tenses, "Use it or lose it?"

It's interesting to see a mathematical model applied to language.

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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.

I don't think this is anything we didn't already know. But it's interesting to see it quantified like this. Radioactive verbs!

One thing I'd like to add is that today's irregular verbs were oftentimes yesterday's regular ones. Germanic strong verbs, e.g., English sing, sang, sung, didn't start out as irregular, but seem that way after the phonological process by which they became differentiated became less productive. There are even some cases of regular verbs being reanalyzed as irregular, e.g., dive, dived[/i] ~ dove.

It's interesting how the urge to regularize is often chastened. Suppletive forms like good, better ~ *gooder, or go, went ~ *goed. But not lesser; less was the original comparative form of little.

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Originally posted by zmježd:
One thing I'd like to add is that today's irregular verbs were oftentimes yesterday's regular ones. Germanic strong verbs, e.g., English sing, sang, sung, didn't start out as irregular, but seem that way after the phonological process by which they became differentiated became less productive.

I didn't know this! The regular ablaut differences in PIE were continued into Proto-Germanic, where they became the main markers of grammatical distinctions. I could be wrong, but I gather that the PIE forms *sengʷh-, *songʷh- and *sn̥gʷh- (e-grade, o-grade, and zero-grade respectively), which formed a regular paradigm, became English sing, sang, sung. Other sound changes have obscured the regularity, and also ablaut ceased to be productive in Proto-Germanic. Another example is eat, ate, eaten.

I understand that the verb "to shit" is perfectly regular (if you'll excuse the phrase) but many people nowadays use "shat" instead of "shitted"; it somehow seems more right.

"Shat," which rhymes with the French word for "cat." Any connection? As you know, when the cat's away, the house smells better!

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So, essentially they're saying WRT irregular verb past tenses, "Use it or lose it?"

This is mostly true of verbs today. Do you know what the word "wrought" comes from? Stephen Pinker talked about this in depth in "Words and Rules".

Didn't wrought and wright come from the same root meaning work?

Do you know what the word "wrought" comes from?

Wrought is from the past participle of work :- Old English wyrcan ~ gewroht, related to Greek εργον (ergon). Example usage being: What had God wrought?