I can't believe they discussed plurals in English and missed the most interesting piece!
The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows, chicken, sheep).
I think you are mixing up Norsemen and Normans. Norsemen (Scandinavians, sometimes called Vikings) spoke a Germanic language (called old Norse, the ancestor of current Scandinavian languages), while the Normans spoke French. English have been influenced by both, but the Norman invasion was later. Beef, veal, mutton etc. are from french.
You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.
Wamba, up and help me an thou beest a man; take a turn round the back o' the hill to gain the wind on them; and when thous't got the weather-gage, thou mayst drive them before thee as gently as so many innocent lambs."
"Truly," said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, "I have consulted my legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of opinion, that to carry my gay garments through these sloughs, would be an act of unfriendship to my sovereign person and royal wardrobe; wherefore, Gurth, I advise thee to call off Fangs, and leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort."
"The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth; "expound that to me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to read riddles."
"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon. God's blessing on our master Cedric, he hath done the work of a man in standing in the gap; but Reginald Front-de-Boeuf is coming down to this country in person, and we shall soon see how little Cedric's trouble will avail him. ---Here, here," he exclaimed again, raising his voice, "So ho! so ho! well done, Fangs! thou hast them all before thee now, and bring'st them on bravely, lad."
The book The Unfolding of Language[1] describes the forces that shape how language evolves. One is extending the use of a pattern (e.g. "en" for plural), even in cases like this one where it wasn't technically appropriate. Another is the use of metaphor. E.g. "discover" used to mean "to remove the cover of", but now its meaning is purely metaphorical and the literal meaning has been mostly lost. Another is laziness: slurring long compound phrases together until they're effectively one word. A lot of conjugations/declentions are a result of this. I recommend this book if you're interested in how languages change over time; it's very well written.
EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, "wicked" used to mean "evil", but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it's started to mean "sweet".
Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar parts. Most objects are made of multiple parts though and they get a singular name just fine.
The W is called "double-u" because it dates from the era when U and V were the same letter (the consonant and vowel versions diverged) and there was no W letter, but only a doubled-U. The phrase, "I want a veal sandwich on Tuesday" would have been spelled, "I uuant a ueal sanduuich on Tuesday" (or, alternatively, "I vvant a veal sandvvich on Tvesday"). This is also why u, v, and w are consecutive in the alphabet.
This is similar to why the & character is called "ampersand"--it was originally considered a letter, and instead of the alphabet ending in "x, y, and z", it ended in "x, y, z, and per-se 'and'".
Grammatically plural nouns denoting single objects is something that occurs in multiple European languages (and perhaps others), not only English.
English French Slovak
pliers pinces kliešte
pants pantalons nohavice
scissors ciseaux nožnice
All plural. The singular "kliešť" exists, but it refers to an insect: the tick. The word "nohavica" is used when referring to just one of the pant legs. (E.g. one being rolled up, getting wet, or being sewn differently, or other such contexts.)
I can live with "glasses", "pants", "pliers" and "scissors", but "data" drives me crazy because even native speakers seem to be completely inconsistent when it comes to its number.
EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas (plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data, it's Visum (singular) and Visa (plural).
> Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar parts.
As a countable noun, aside from also being a drinking vessel, "a glass" is a lens or monocle. A pair of glasses is exactly a pair of those. These definitions are still in current use.
Its true that the singular terms for the others are no longer in common current use, so the plural seems odd, but glasses is a particularly bad example.
In other languages, there is a number (dual) that deals with cases like this. It's been dropping from most languages where it's used. In Russian it's mostly gone, but alot of the endings remain.
Also lot's of languages when borrowing from English do away with the plural if it's obvious. Like in french, a pair of jeans is just un jean, singular.
It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent:
+ The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca.
+ For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as a global lingua franca, but "misspellings" should be tolerated as well as discussed at length in the comments here.)
+ We should accept usages such as "childs," vice children, and "it's" as a possessive, as being proper English and not mistakes. (English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes.")
Such an approach to achieving a common global tongue would be more likely to succeed than was seen with Esperanto.
In Russian it's "ребёнок" (child) and "дети" (children). "Дети" is actually a plural form of now archaic "дитя" and used because... "ребёнок" does not have a plural form.
The funny thing here is that "ребёнок" while not being archic comes from an anchient-russian "робя", which has plural form "робята", which is actually used in modern language too, but meaning can be anything from "boys" to "guys" or any other generalisation of a group of young people (both boys and girls).
PS: at the same time you can actually invent a plural for "ребенок" if you want to, but it may be considered as something similar to cockney, but used on purpose in otherwise normal speech.
This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n.
So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men
(Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "kirker". Or in old dialects in Ireland, "children" is sometimes spoken as "childer".
EDIT: I retract my theory on the relationship between children and kindern :)
Curiously, Kinder and children are completely unrelated. Child comes from the Proto-Germanic kelþaz which further came from the Proto-Indo-European stem gel-. On the other hand, "Kind" comes from Proto-Germanic kinþa, which comes from a Proto-Indo-European stem ǵenh₁- meaning "to produce, to give birth", whence also "genesis", "genealogy" and "gonad".
German definitely did not cause those curious plurals. We know for sure Old English had them itself from Proto-Germanic, and it makes a lot more sense for a language to retain irregular forms for words that are used very often, than to loan grammar, which is a relatively rare occurrence.
EDIT: How do you type asterisks here? Escaping with a backslash doesn't work, nor does using three in a row
No, those words are ancient, much older than any remotely modern German. They come from Proto-Germanic via Old English and have cognates in most Germanic languages. Kin words are usually among the most preserved and most rarely borrowed words in a language, as are words related to agriculture and animal husbandry.
Speakers of my Irish-border dialect do sometimes use "childer" instead of "children", you're correct. I suppose many remnants of old English (and equally other languages) are preserved in random local dialects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it went father back. Farsi, another Indo European language has the -en/an ending, for human nouns. Child/Bache -> children/bachegan, brother/boradar -> brethren/boradaran,
Daughter/dokhtar -> dokhtaran. I'm not sure if they share the same derivations but seem related.
When I was growing up in rural Ireland in the 80s, it was quite common to hear childer used as the plural for child so it was interesting to read in the submitted article that this usage dates from Middle English. Some of my parents’ generation used this word but it was mostly spoken by my grandparents’ generation. Its usage seems to have mostly died out in the decades since then and I haven’t heard it spoken in years. On a related note, the word chisler was used by the older generations of Dubliners as colloquial term for child.
Huh... I wonder if the the "eng" from England and English related to the Middle English englen and Old English englas for "angels"? Is England the land of angels?
According to the Venerable Bede, Pope Gregory I drew the same parallel in ~595: "Non Angli, sed angeli – They are not Angles, but angels. Well named, for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.".
"... and the archaic eyen come from." - weirdly this isn't so archaic in the corner of Scotland I'm from. In our dialect we have "een" (which confusingly has a homonym "een" for "one"). Example usage:
Article misses the broader context. This is from the Germanic roots; existing Germanic languages still have this as a predominant pluralization pattern. German: auge (eye), augen (eyes).
So how about the plurals of some words ending with "us", like fungus-fungi, but virus-viruses-not-virii and how about dingus-dingii-or-dinguses, doofus-doofii-or-doofuses and so forth?
pff, what we really need it's Chinese language written in pinyin lacking tones, that's as primitive grammar as you can get, it doesn't even have plural
people think Chinese it's complicated language, but the opposite it's truth, the characters and tones are making it scary, but once you get rid off characters and tones it's one of the simplest languages, much more logical than English
English itself it's extremely illogical languag with way too many exceptions not following general rule, heck even Slavic languages (again more difficult at first sight) are more logical than English
The evolution of language fascinates me. English has a fascinating history. 1000 years ago Old English and Althochdeutch (Old High German) were almost interchangeable (AFAIK). The really fascinating part was the period after 1066 for several centuries where English wasn't the court language of England.
Now this period and lack of centralization is probably responsible for the many dialects (which now are mostly just different accents for other reasons). But the language changed so much over this period. Middle English is largely readable (but weird) to the modern reader. Old English is basically a different language.
In this period English lost of what I like to call the bullshit like gender of (non-person) nouns. Case of nouns (other than pronouns) also basically disappeared. It still had the formal/informal distinction of the second person that so many other European languages had (but we lost that later). Verbs and nouns became way more regular.
None of this happened with German (although Germany as a country didn't really exist until the 19th century and was at best a collection of city-states prior to that) but German in its various forms was still the ruling language (although Latin always had a certain preeminence what with the Holy Roman Empire and the Electors and all).
Compare modern German grammar (where nouns and adjectives have to agree with case, number, gender and article). It strongly suggests that the ruling class seems to embody conservatism and traditions, which is unsurprising given that the status quo is pretty good if you're the ruling class.
You see this in England where the precursor to modern French was the court language of England for hundreds of years. This has the effect of keeping commoners out (even more than they already are by virtue of hereditary title).
It's almost like without central control English became more democratized.
Obviously the printing press had a massive effect in standardizing spelling (other posters have mentioned that u and v were largely interchangeable).
Radio (and later TV) had a massive effect on standardizing pronunciation.
But still English has rapidly changed. One example I remember is if you go back and listen to early speeches by Churchill you'll here him say "nazi" not as "natsi" but as "nazzi" (much like the non-American ss in "aussie"). But by later in the war (IIRC) the "ts" phenom had pretty much been imported into English.
Another thing I read was the mathematical model for how verbs become regular [1]. Basically, the less a verb is used, the sooner it becomes regular but how long it takes is quite predictable. Apparently "to wed" is the next verb to become regular. "To be" should take about 44,000 years.
It makes you realize just how rapidly language changes and how grammar really is descriptive not prescriptive and why it's completely pointless to get your pedantic about "literally", less vs fewer, "very unique" and so on.
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows, chicken, sheep).
[+] [-] olavk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevula|7 years ago|reply
You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.
[+] [-] ravitation|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rplnt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|7 years ago|reply
* * *
Wamba, up and help me an thou beest a man; take a turn round the back o' the hill to gain the wind on them; and when thous't got the weather-gage, thou mayst drive them before thee as gently as so many innocent lambs."
"Truly," said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, "I have consulted my legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of opinion, that to carry my gay garments through these sloughs, would be an act of unfriendship to my sovereign person and royal wardrobe; wherefore, Gurth, I advise thee to call off Fangs, and leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort."
"The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth; "expound that to me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to read riddles."
"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon. God's blessing on our master Cedric, he hath done the work of a man in standing in the gap; but Reginald Front-de-Boeuf is coming down to this country in person, and we shall soon see how little Cedric's trouble will avail him. ---Here, here," he exclaimed again, raising his voice, "So ho! so ho! well done, Fangs! thou hast them all before thee now, and bring'st them on bravely, lad."
[+] [-] lvkleist|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] justinpombrio|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, "wicked" used to mean "evil", but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it's started to mean "sweet".
And there's always the great consonant shift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Manki...
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aardwolf|7 years ago|reply
That and the "double u", why not "we"??
[+] [-] philwelch|7 years ago|reply
This is similar to why the & character is called "ampersand"--it was originally considered a letter, and instead of the alphabet ending in "x, y, and z", it ended in "x, y, z, and per-se 'and'".
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas (plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data, it's Visum (singular) and Visa (plural).
[+] [-] dragonwriter|7 years ago|reply
As a countable noun, aside from also being a drinking vessel, "a glass" is a lens or monocle. A pair of glasses is exactly a pair of those. These definitions are still in current use.
Its true that the singular terms for the others are no longer in common current use, so the plural seems odd, but glasses is a particularly bad example.
[+] [-] csours|7 years ago|reply
I do wonder if simpler english will ever catch on
I do wondr if simplr nglsh wil evr cach on.
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amaccuish|7 years ago|reply
Also lot's of languages when borrowing from English do away with the plural if it's obvious. Like in french, a pair of jeans is just un jean, singular.
[+] [-] dctoedt|7 years ago|reply
+ The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca.
+ For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as a global lingua franca, but "misspellings" should be tolerated as well as discussed at length in the comments here.)
+ We should accept usages such as "childs," vice children, and "it's" as a possessive, as being proper English and not mistakes. (English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes.")
Such an approach to achieving a common global tongue would be more likely to succeed than was seen with Esperanto.
[+] [-] konart|7 years ago|reply
The funny thing here is that "ребёнок" while not being archic comes from an anchient-russian "робя", which has plural form "робята", which is actually used in modern language too, but meaning can be anything from "boys" to "guys" or any other generalisation of a group of young people (both boys and girls).
PS: at the same time you can actually invent a plural for "ребенок" if you want to, but it may be considered as something similar to cockney, but used on purpose in otherwise normal speech.
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|7 years ago|reply
"Ребята" is the plural form for singular "ребёнок". However the meaning of "ребята" is migrating from "children" to "young guys".
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jpmattia|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG7REAOG1kc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cZR1EXGapc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kg63k5JDH8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqlVl0K9tw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVH6LdoEDNs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJLDvP-N0zQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej60L8xLLdo
[+] [-] amaccuish|7 years ago|reply
So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men
(Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "kirker". Or in old dialects in Ireland, "children" is sometimes spoken as "childer".
EDIT: I retract my theory on the relationship between children and kindern :)
[+] [-] kmm|7 years ago|reply
German definitely did not cause those curious plurals. We know for sure Old English had them itself from Proto-Germanic, and it makes a lot more sense for a language to retain irregular forms for words that are used very often, than to loan grammar, which is a relatively rare occurrence.
EDIT: How do you type asterisks here? Escaping with a backslash doesn't work, nor does using three in a row
[+] [-] Sharlin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filmor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iandioch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abecode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Anthony-G|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madez|7 years ago|reply
It's not like German were "at fault". English grew out of a common ancestor with nowadays German.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aldo712|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gvx|7 years ago|reply
(Regular plural suffixes are -en and -s.)
[+] [-] russellbeattie|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Ah, no. It's from the Angles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
[+] [-] mrec|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Gregory_I#Famous_quotes_a...
[+] [-] nvahalik|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1ris|7 years ago|reply
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Children%2C+Ch...
[+] [-] ekianjo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diehunde|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|7 years ago|reply
https://blog.assarbad.net/20090810/das-madchen-why-is-it-gra...
[+] [-] jammi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3m4j|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Markoff|7 years ago|reply
people think Chinese it's complicated language, but the opposite it's truth, the characters and tones are making it scary, but once you get rid off characters and tones it's one of the simplest languages, much more logical than English
English itself it's extremely illogical languag with way too many exceptions not following general rule, heck even Slavic languages (again more difficult at first sight) are more logical than English
[+] [-] cletus|7 years ago|reply
Now this period and lack of centralization is probably responsible for the many dialects (which now are mostly just different accents for other reasons). But the language changed so much over this period. Middle English is largely readable (but weird) to the modern reader. Old English is basically a different language.
In this period English lost of what I like to call the bullshit like gender of (non-person) nouns. Case of nouns (other than pronouns) also basically disappeared. It still had the formal/informal distinction of the second person that so many other European languages had (but we lost that later). Verbs and nouns became way more regular.
None of this happened with German (although Germany as a country didn't really exist until the 19th century and was at best a collection of city-states prior to that) but German in its various forms was still the ruling language (although Latin always had a certain preeminence what with the Holy Roman Empire and the Electors and all).
Compare modern German grammar (where nouns and adjectives have to agree with case, number, gender and article). It strongly suggests that the ruling class seems to embody conservatism and traditions, which is unsurprising given that the status quo is pretty good if you're the ruling class.
You see this in England where the precursor to modern French was the court language of England for hundreds of years. This has the effect of keeping commoners out (even more than they already are by virtue of hereditary title).
It's almost like without central control English became more democratized.
Obviously the printing press had a massive effect in standardizing spelling (other posters have mentioned that u and v were largely interchangeable).
Radio (and later TV) had a massive effect on standardizing pronunciation.
But still English has rapidly changed. One example I remember is if you go back and listen to early speeches by Churchill you'll here him say "nazi" not as "natsi" but as "nazzi" (much like the non-American ss in "aussie"). But by later in the war (IIRC) the "ts" phenom had pretty much been imported into English.
Another thing I read was the mathematical model for how verbs become regular [1]. Basically, the less a verb is used, the sooner it becomes regular but how long it takes is quite predictable. Apparently "to wed" is the next verb to become regular. "To be" should take about 44,000 years.
It makes you realize just how rapidly language changes and how grammar really is descriptive not prescriptive and why it's completely pointless to get your pedantic about "literally", less vs fewer, "very unique" and so on.
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2009/09/2...