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Rarely Used Words Become Extinct Faster
October 11, 2007 at 4:27 PM
Lifestyle News
Over the years, several past tense forms of verbs have died out in English and now only one persists as a rule: adding "-ed" to the end of verbs.
Lead researcher, Erez Lieberman, a specialist in evolutionary maths at Harvard University, and his team found that an irregular verb used 100 times less frequently is regularized 10 times as fast. In mathematical words, the half-life of irregular verbs is proportional to the square root of their frequency.
Lieberman predicts that the next verb to fall into line will be wed, the past tense of which will regularize from wed to wedded.
He adds that both papers call attention to the similarities between language change and the evolution of species. Leiberman even refers to early English as a primordial soup of verb forms in his paper.
"By being more frequent, a verb is more stable. Both studies, illustrate this profound effect that frequency has in the survival of a word, Leiberman says.
Both studies are published in Nature.
Source-ANI
LIN /J
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