Is it possible for a new irregular verb to appear in English language?


Consider these verbs in past tense:



faxed, emailed, googled



they are all regular verbs made out of new nouns.
Are there any new irregular verbs that I'm not aware of?



Answer



I think it's unlikely a new irregular verb will catch on today, given the marked tendency to modify/discard even the ones we still have.


Of the 312 [irregular verbs] which were operative in Old English, only 66 (ie 34%) remain irregular in the twentieth century. And frankly, most of them aren't particularly well-known. Most people don't even realise that wrought, for example, is a past tense form of to work - they just think it's a word that sometimes comes before iron.


You sometimes hear, for example, "thunk" as a "neologistic" past tense for "to think" (similarly snoze, squoze, shat). I doubt such deliberately quirky usage is ever likely to become widespread, but the Internet at large does still seem to be undecided over tweeted, twat, twot, twittered, twitted.


It's worth noting this from one of the best in the field - Steven Pinker...



The ten commonest verbs in English (be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get) are all irregular, and about 70% of the time we use a verb, it is an irregular verb.



My example "shat" above may be an exception that proves the rule. Until I read Pinker's summary in the link, I had no real opinion on whether it was ever a "grammatically valid" form. For obvious reasons grammarians of the past might well not have included "to shit" in lists of irregular verbs, even if they knew it was one. Pinker had it as an example of cool, funny, distinctive "neologistically irregular" forms, so I just copied it in. But even he could be mistaken - I know I'm being quirky if I say "The cat shat on the mat", but to my mind the only problem with "Some bloody fox shat on my new decking last night!" is the circumstances causing me to say it, not the grammar itself.


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