[mrec]

"Compression" applies very much to grammatical variants of words. It's why the only bizarre irregular verbs in a language tend to be the ones that get used all the time - be, do, go etc - because for anything more obscure the brain just forgets the special case and applies the general rule.

Steven Pinker's book Words and Rules is a great layman-oriented read if this sort of thing interests you.

[coldtea]

It also makes sense why the most common verbs are irregular in most languages: to have us pick the direct word quickly, instead of the slower way of deriving it from a rule.

So, they're like "constants" vs calling a function to calculate a value.

[mrec]

Not sure I follow. If (big if) there were really a measureable advantage to having us "pick the direct word quickly, instead of the slower way of deriving it from a rule", it doesn't follow that irregularity makes that easier. I could memorize "goed" just as easily as I can memorize "went".

[coldtea]

>I could memorize "goed" just as easily as I can memorize "went".

It wouldn't have anything distinctive for people to latch on to, so they would be constantly trying to derive it from the general rules for regular verbs.

E.g.

(a) all verbs regular -> instinctively go to (slower) rule derivation instead of memorization of all verbs, even for the most common ones.

(b) most frequent verbs being irregular -> instinctively retrieve them from the (faster) "lookup table" of memorizations, and bypass the rule based derivation for them.

I.e having the clear distinction of irregularity makes it faster to go directly to that kind of "constant" memory.

That said, this is not my theory, read it years ago in a cognitive/linguistic pop science article. This seems to say more or less the same thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_and_irregular_verbs#Li...

In studies of first language acquisition (where the aim is to establish how the human brain processes its native language), one debate among 20th-century linguists revolved around whether small children learn all verb forms as separate pieces of vocabulary or whether they deduce forms by the application of rules. Since a child can hear a regular verb for the first time and immediately reuse it correctly in a different conjugated form which he or she has never heard, it is clear that the brain does work with rules; but irregular verbs must be processed differently.

[simias]

I took it the other way around: it's easy to memorize "went" because you use it all the time. If on the other hand a much less common verb like "to satiate" had a very irregular conjugation then it would regularize pretty quickly because nobody but ultra-pedants would bother to remember the exception.

I think a decent real example of that is fiancé/fiancée, those are french borrowings and have, at least originally, kept the French grammatical gender inflection. However nowadays I often see people using either spelling in a gender-neutral way since most people don't bother to learn French grammar for this one word.

[coldtea]

>I took it the other way around: it's easy to memorize "went" because you use it all the time.

That still wouldn't explain the why of having it like "went" vs "goed".

Sure, it's easy to memorize because we use it all the time, but why have it to memorize it in the first place, versus something like "goed".

So, this theory (I tried to convey above) said that it being irregular placed ensured we don't slow down try to derive it from regular rules, but instead have fast access to a memorized form.

Couldn't we just memorize "goed"? If it's just "frequency of use" that mattered, "went" and "goed" would work just as well.

But the extra idea is that "goed", being regular, would be too easy for us to confuse with thousand of other regular verbs, and not use our "fast recall" mechanism, regardless of that verb being needed all the time.

Not sure if correct - read it years ago. This seems to be related to that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_and_irregular_verbs#Li...

[simias]

Your point is interesting but I think you're falling for the same type of fallacies people often have regarding evolution (if you keep going into water for a long time over many generations you'll eventually grow gills!).

Natural languages are not designed, they evolve. The irregular nature of the conjugation of "to go" might just be a remnant of some archaic form and nothing else, in the same way some argue that the plural of "octopus" is "octopi" or "octopodes. Does it serve any linguistic purpose? I don't see how, but it won't stop some people for saying it. Look at the use of the subjunctive in "if I were you", which is one of the only occurrences of the subjunctive outside of set-phrases in day-to-day modern English. Is it really necessary? If one was to say "if I was you" would it lose some additional nuance or meaning in practice?

I often see people trying to rationalize some language features (such as arbitrary genders of nouns in many languages) as error correction or some "optimization" but I'm generally unconvinced. Maybe "I went" is just the linguistic equivalent of a platypus, some weird byproduct of a very long evolution with no other intrinsic purpose in the grand scheme of things.

[coldtea]

>Natural languages are not designed, they evolve.

But that's part of my point. I don't say irregular verbs were designed to be effective that way, but that they were evolved to be effective.

Hence the link with "language acquisition" being involved -- when regular and irregular verbs developed that wasn't a known theory some "language designer" could consciously follow. Just something innate that could develop because of a evolutionary advantage.

In fact, if someone merely designed, they'd probably go for all regular, rather than regular + irregular, as it's "cleaner".

>I often see people trying to rationalize some language features (such as arbitrary genders of nouns in many languages) as error correction or some "optimization" but I'm generally unconvinced.

Tons of language features are indeed optimizations for different things. Cold climates for example have languages with less vowels (keeping your mouth closed more).