Re: THEORY: Storage Vs. Computation

Ed Heil wrote:
> But surely it's not true that there is a unidirectional tendency
> towards loss of irregularity?
Of course not, both tendencies exist.  Frequently used verbs are
sometimes replaced by other verbs in certain forms, as is happening
today with "got" and "have", or as happened earlier with "go" and "went"
(originally the past tense of "wend"), and also nouns, as with "people"
ousting "persons".  But, there's also a slow tendency towards
regularization, probably caused by children mislearning their language,
most of those mistakes, like "mans" for "men" are replaced, but every
once in a while, one sticks, and so we now say "cows" instead of
"kyne".  I THINK, I'm not too sure of this, but I THINK that
irregularities tend to develop rapidly, in bursts, as with strong verbs
in English - at one time predictable, but the language changed, and they
became unpredictable, therefore irregular, and tend to be lost slowly
and gradually.
--
Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting
-- Benjamin Franklin
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