Natural selection in verbs

Recently at a friend’s place, I encountered Beowulf, an Old English epic poem written probably between the 8th century and the 11th century. Understanding it was tough, even with translations — and tougher for someone like me who would rather read a graphic novel (and I do not mean children comics) than diving into classic or modern literature. 

I failed miserably, but the arduous 20-minute journey into Beowulf sparked a curiosity: Why words either evolve or get lost? Why words like “swelce (also)” and “findan (to find)” don’t exist anymore? Well, that rese­arch is still on (much simpler: I am bored and taken over by another idea). Why verbs get lost/evolve? Why it’s “helped” and not “holp”, as in ancient times? 

By the way, did you know English alphabets had way more than 26 letters and “W” wasn’t one of them, and that “&” is not a symbol but an ancient alphabet like “3” (not the number but which stood for “gh”)? Or that “hallux” is the anatomical name for the toe? I knew the latter, I forgot and I re-discovered — the first two steps of the process are fairly common with verbs, though the last is an exception, not a rule.

To understand why we lost certain verbs or words, a guide into Zipf’s law, proposed by linguist Geo­rge K Zipf, would be necessary. He states that given a large sample of words, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank on the frequency table (a word “x” will have a frequency proportional to 1/x). Or, the most frequent word will occur about twice as often as the sec­ond most popular word, and so on. 

Representative Image

For example, according to a study of the Brown Corpus, or the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which has slightly over a million words, “the” was the most frequent, nearly 7 per cent of all word occurrences (69,971 times), followed by “of” 3.5 per cent (36,411 times). Only 135 vocabulary items were needed to account for half the Brown Corpus. And this shows that not all words are created equal; some are often used and many aren’t.

Pretty much everything in languages follows Zipf’s law, but irregular verbs. The most common verbs in English language are “be”, “have”, “do”, “say”, “get”, “make”, “go”, “know”, “take”, “see”, “come” and “think” — all irregular (just a Google search is enough; almost all replies have the same pattern). There are only 200 irregular verbs in English in a vast world of regular verbs, but hardly any of these is uncommon. Had irregular verbs followed Zipf’s law, only a few would have been common and the rest rarely used.

So why is this anomaly? Or, is it? It appears that irregular verbs are ancient ones, belonging to an around 5,000-year-old language called Proto Indo European, the forefather of both English and Hindi, and many other languages. In this language, the tense of a verb could have been changed by an alternation in the vowels of related word form (ablaut), like sing, sang, sung. But later, the speakers of Proto-Germanic, which evolved from Proto Indo European, started adding verbs, not following ablauts but by simply adding “t” or “-ed”. Actually, verbs like “sent” or “crashed” must have been actually irregular back then. 

More and more verbs were added to the English language and generally, all of them changed tense using “-t” and “-ed”. Also, many older verbs switched over to the new pattern like “slew” became “slayed”. Since the Beowulf-era, three of every four verbs have been regularised. Though a few verbs went in reverse, like “haved” became “had” and “maked” transformed into “made”. 

Still, we have irregular verbs. Why? Researchers tracked down 177 irregular verbs since Beowulf was written, and found that 79 of them were regularised in Modern English. This study also suggested that most frequently used verbs usually stayed irregular and the rarely used became regular — natural selection after all.

So, irregular verbs are not exceptions to Zipf’s law. Researchers have predicted that no-so-often used verb “sting (used 10 times for every 100,000 verbs)” would regularise in 700 years, and a verb like “drink” would take 5,000 years for such a process. They claim “wed”, an irregular verb, is already in the process of becoming “wedded”. 

Oh! I completely forgetted to end my nerdy monologue, which after adding a few words may become another source material for a study on Zipf’s law. Thanks, Beowulf. And remember, “if we don’t use it, we may lose it (courtesy, a science show on YouTube)”.