Here we are -- men, women, and children of the 21st century -- texting, talking, streaming videos, and listening to podcasts on our slick new cell phones, Blackberrys, iPods, and computers – but still using many basic nouns and verbs that are well over 1000 years old. That seems practically un-American! How could a culture so bent on “now” and “new” and “the future” still use words that can be traced back to the mists of time?
Obviously, people and their language can’t evolve as fast as technology. But what strikes me as cooler than an iPhone is that even a phrase like, “Here we are – men, women, and children” – is made up of words that were spoken by pillaging Vikings, the savage Goths, and the Proto-European tribes spread out over Northern Europe and Russia thousands of years ago.
So, if you’re with me on a little linguistic time travel, you might appreciate a recent Harvard study, published in the October 2007 issue of Nature and written about in a variety of newspapers and periodicals; in the study, researchers came up with a mathematical formula for predicting how long it would take an irregular verb (like write-wrote-written) to become a regular verb (like look-looked-looked). The researchers’ conclusion was that frequency of usage kept an irregular verb from changing: that a verb used 100 times less frequently than another is 10 times more likely to change over a given period. In other words, use it or lose it.
At this rate, for instance, the verb “to be” would take 38,000 years before someone would say, “I beed” instead of “I was.” The same formula said that it would take a scant 14,400 years for “thinked” to replace “thought.”
Of more imminent interest were words like “wed” and “forecast,” which were among 15 verbs that the researchers predicted would change to a regular-verb “ed” ending within the next 500 years. To test that theory, I did quick Google search with “they were wed,” which brought up 11 million sites, as opposed to 1 million sites with “they were wedded.” Change is afoot (“afoot” being first coined in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”) but not yet fully here.
Testing “forecast” vs. “forecasted” was not so accurate, since “forecast” is both a noun and a verb, so the Google results wildly in favor (103 million results) of the traditional “forecast” were skewed. However, the Free (online) Dictionary lists both “forecast” and “forecasted” as past tense options. And there were some 3 million other sites with “forecasted” in the heading.
I have also noticed that the verb “seek” has fans of the past tense “seeked,” though still more fans of the traditional “sought;” and “strive” is in the balance between the traditional “strove” and the newer “strived.”
“Irregular” verbs did not originate as such 1,200 years ago, when English was developing out of a West Germanic/Saxon dialect; rather, those verbs were following certain standard pattern and conjugation systems. The ones that we use now, according to Wikipedia, are remnants (or fossils) of those ancient rules.
The rules and patterns for these now-irregular verbs were gradually displaced between the years 1200-1600 by changes in English pronunciation, a period linguists call The Great Vowel Shift. It was during this time that past tenses started to use an “ed” on the end of most past tenses and participles. According to the study, the old verbs that entered unchanged into the new system were ones that were frequently used: rise-rose, break-broke, bite-bit, catch-caught, think-thought, etc.
The study’s rule of frequency figures that when a word is used often, it tends not to change because of natural correction. That is, children who unconsciously follow the regular past tense pattern and say, “I seed you” will eventually hear “I saw you” so much, that they will adopt the irregular tense without any trouble.
To develop their formula the Harvard researchers, two graduate students in applied mathematics in the Evolutionary Dynamics program, traced the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English (think: “Beowulf,” 800 A.D.) through Middle English (1066-1450) to modern English (Shakespeare to now). According to their study, the 177 irregular verbs of Old English shrank to 145 irregular ones in Middle English, shrinking to today’s 98 irregular verbs.
The modern irregular verb list may be proportionately small (roughly 3% of all verbs), but it has some heavy hitters. The top ten most-used verbs in English are all irregular: to be-was/were, to go-went, to have-had, to do-did, to say-said, to see-saw, to take-took, and to get-got, plus the helping verbs, can-could and will-would.
But what’s curious about the “frequency” theory is this: according to the study, words like bake, climb, fold, reach, starve, and yield were irregular in Old and Middle English but have since become regular. Does this mean people between Middle and Modern English didn’t say those words very much? I don’t think so. In fact, maybe those words were used SO frequently back then that it was easier to make them regular. Who knows? The study does not address this point.
I myself did a small (in fact, microscopic) study on changing past tense verbs, for a Linguistics class at Hunter College back in 2004. In it, I surveyed the pronunciation variation of the past tense for the following: sneak, shrink, creep, dream, leap, kneel, dive, and sink. That is, do you say: sneaked or snuck; shrank or shrunk; crept or creeped; dreamt or dreamed; leaped or leapt; knelt or kneeled; dived or dove; sank or sunk?
I asked 9 people, ages 12-78, mostly family members or friends, with the addition of one hairdresser and the man in the hair salon chair next to me. The results showed that age was not a factor, since word choices varied within age groups; and for most of my survey group, both past tense forms sounded natural. One participant, a 28-year-old male, added that he was not above adjusting his preferences to certain situations. He said, “I might say, ‘I dreamt about you’ to a girl, just because it sounds more literary than ‘dreamed,’ which is the word I’d otherwise use.” (Ladies: Beware of men saying “dreamt!”)
One reason both verb choices sounded correct, I observed in the paper, was that because Americans tend to move a lot, there is a lot of mixing and mingling of pronunciation. Some people unconsciously change their words in a new environment, while others cling to their native-born pronunciation, and both forms are passed on to children.
As for sneak-snuck, I found that Edward Finegan, the author of my Linguistics class textbook, Language: Its Structure and Use was actually wrong: he said that the traditional past tense form of “sneak” was “sneaked,” but that “snuck” was a commonly accepted variation. However, I found that “snuck” was actually closer to the original Norwegian and Danish words that gave us this verb. “Snike” in Norwegian and “snege” in Danish used “snek and “sneg” respectively for the past tense – so “snuck” is actually the older past tense, and “sneaked” would be the upstart. (This was my first linguistic discovery.)
So, as we type, text, and otherwise click our electronic way through the day, you might appreciate how far those words have come to appear on your tiny, shiny screen. I’m not just referring to the technology that has brought us such newbies as “to google,” “to youtube,” and “to email,” (all spoken and spelled with the regular past “ed” endings). I mean, a simple “How r u?” which represents more than a millennium in the making.
