Watch Your Language Blog

"Wedded" Under Pressure

Two Harvard scientists predict that irregular verbs that do not take the -ed ending in the past tense are prone to "regularization":

Lieberman and Michel's group computed the "half-lives" of the surviving irregular verbs to predict how long they will take to regularize. The most common ones, such as "be" and "think," have such long half-lives (38,800 years and 14,400 years, respectively) that they will effectively never become regular. Irregular verbs with lower frequencies of use -- such as "shrive" and "smite," with half-lives of 300 and 700 years, respectively -- are much more likely to succumb to regularization.

Lieberman, Michel, and their co-authors project that the next word to regularize will likely be "wed." (Via link.) (ELHAM)


October 17, 2007