The weak (verb) shall inherit the earth

A mathematician friend of mine recently introduced me to number personalities. There are, he told me, such things as sexy primes as well as wicked, sad, and untouchable numbers, all endowed with a human characteristic that makes their definitions a little more accessible to a layperson like me. The categories of English grammar rarely provide the same quirkiness, but there are exceptions, and when one of my subscribers suggested ‘strong verbs’ as a topic for a post they reminded me of one of them. That word ‘strong’ automatically conjures up an arm with flexing biceps, not unlike the muscle emoji we send to a friend to cheer them on. It also implies that this particular personality type is the powerhouse of every English sentence. Not any more.

A definition first of all. What makes a verb strong in the first place? The simple answer is that its past tense looks different to its present tense because we have changed the vowels in its stem. We are surrounded by examples: we sing a song we should have sung with the choir who sang it yesterday; we buy the same bread that we bought last week; we begin a post that we should have begun yesterday before the procrastination began. This vowel-swapping involves a process known as ‘ablaut’, and it is a regular feature of Indo-European languages.

The equation would of course be incomplete without the ‘weak’ verbs, which you might imagine limping on in the wake of their buff companions. A verb is considered weak if it keeps its root and simply adds on a dental suffix such as -d or -ed. We walk the same path others have walked, we love the film that our friends also loved, we hear the same things that others have already heard. Such weak endings are now the default, so that any new arrival will characteristically follow suit. Consider ‘googled’, ‘texted’, ‘emailed’, or ‘photobombed’ – even ‘screenshotted’, which to my ears sounds ridiculous.

It wasn’t always this way. The truth is that English steadily fell out of love with strong verbs. Those that once did the heavy lifting have slowly relaxed over the lifespan of English. A fascinating mathematical study carried out by Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics followed the trajectory of 177 verbs that were irregular over a millennium ago, in Old English. By the time Middle English arrived after the Norman Conquest, 145 were still irregular. Today, of that original 177, 98 remain irregular. The direction of travel is clear.

The study also suggests another characteristic of language: that this is all about the survival of the fittest. It found that any verb used a hundred times less frequently will become weak ten times as fast. Conversely, the irregular stalwarts that we fall back on every day, such as be, write, see, go, do, show no sign of ever joining the endangered list. The team behind the study, led by Erez Lieberman and Jean-Baptiste Michel, even made a stab at predicting the next casualty. ‘Now’, they write, ‘may be your last chance to be a ‘newly wed’ until ‘wedded’ takes over.

Applying evolutionary principles to language development is revealing. We all recognize that language must change in order to stay alive. But, even with my lexicographer’s hat on, I can’t help but feel wistful at some of the beauties we are losing. I find myself resisting any use of glided, for example, and opting for glid instead, and I lament the loss of the Scottish snew in favour of snowed. Equally, I enjoy holpen over helped, though I did once become unstuck when I declared that the past tense of chide should surely be chode not chided (let’s just say the Urban Dictionary will explain why that’s not a good idea). The Bible will tell us that ‘the cock crew‘ rather than crowed, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s use of clomb instead of climbed in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

US English – the one we all love to slate for its apparent ‘dumbing down’ of the ‘proper’ kind, such as my use of realize above (another story) – has happily retained many a strong verb whilst inventing some of their own.