| >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. |