Why Is It Went and Not Goed? Survivals From an Older Grammar

English verbs mostly form the past tense by adding an ending, and a few dozen do something else, including changing the vowel, changing the whole word or staying the same. That minority is not random leftover chaos but the remains of an older and formerly dominant system, in which Germanic verbs marked tense by changing the vowel according to regular patterns, with different classes of verb following different patterns. The ending-based method was the innovation, spreading gradually and taking over verb after verb, so the verbs still changing their vowel are the ones the newer system has not yet reached. Seen that way, the irregular verbs are the conservative ones and the regular pattern is the recent arrival, which reverses how the situation is usually described.

The exceptions fall into recognisable groups rather than being individually arbitrary:

• •Vowel change alone, in sets that still rhyme with each other, including sing, ring and spring
• •Vowel change plus an ending, including keep and kept
• •No change at all, including cut, put and set
• •Suppletion, where the forms come from entirely different original words, as in go and went
• •Irregularity concentrated in the verb meaning to be, which is irregular in most Indo-European languages
• •A small number of verbs that are regularising now, with both forms in current use

The pattern that irregular forms are common words holds across languages and has a straightforward explanation. An irregular form has to be learned and stored individually rather than generated by rule, so it survives only if speakers encounter it often enough to remember it, and a rarely used verb whose irregular past somebody cannot recall gets a regular ending applied instead, which is how regularisation happens one speaker at a time. Quantitative work has measured this directly, finding that the rate at which English verbs have regularised over the past millennium relates to how often they are used, with rarer verbs regularising far faster, and the relationship is regular enough to predict which of the remaining irregular verbs will go next. Children display the mechanism in miniature when they produce forms like goed.

Regularisation runs mostly one way and the exceptions are instructive. Occasionally a regular verb becomes irregular by analogy with an existing irregular set, which happened to dive, producing dove in North American use by analogy with drive and drove, and to sneak, producing snuck. Verbs entering from other languages arrive regular almost without exception, which is why every recently coined verb takes the standard ending. Dialects preserve older irregular forms that the standard language has lost, so forms considered errors are frequently conservative survivals rather than innovations. And the two forms of a regularising verb frequently split in meaning rather than one simply winning, so that hanged and hung, or a similar pair, end up covering different senses, which preserves both and is a common outcome nobody planned.

The mistakes children make have been used as evidence in a long argument about how language is represented. Young children initially produce correct irregular forms, apparently learned individually, then begin producing regularised errors on those same verbs, and finally return to the correct forms. That sequence indicates they have extracted a rule and are applying it where it does not belong, which is evidence that the rule is genuinely represented rather than every form being memorised. One account holds that the mind contains a rule alongside a list of exceptions, with the rule applying whenever the list fails, while a competing account holds that a single associative system produces both, with regular forms dominating because the pattern is frequent. The argument has run for decades and is not settled.

Irregular verbs preserve an older Germanic system marking tense by vowel change, so they are the conservative forms and the ending is the innovation. They survive because they are common enough to be remembered individually, and measured regularisation rates over a millennium track how often each verb is used. Children's errors show a rule being extracted and overapplied.