Southern accents, Eastern accents, Northern accents and Ebonics

[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by MysticCat

That's what makes it almost futile to try and predict how English will change. It will change based on variables we can't really predict.



Oh, and Dunkin' Donuts' doughnuts are just plain awful.

Of course we can't predict how it will change, and quite frankly any changes that do happen, I think will be quite slow. But we can predict change based on history. According to a language historian, (I can't recall the name) but as I can remember I think there were like 180 irregular English verbs from Old, Middle and Modern English, and he estimated their frequency in everyday speech. He found that the less common a verb, the sooner it regularizes. In other words, irregular verbs that get used a lot remain irregular, in fact, the 10 most common English verbs are irregular. Anyway, from the 180 or so verbs that were tracked, around 75 of them have now regularized. So my question is what is to become of the remaining verbs? Look at the past tense verbs, and how some of them have changed gradually over the past 1200 years. Like in Middle English, I know the word helped was holp at one time, and now it's change into a totally different word with the same meaning. History will certainly repeat itself, and English will change as time goes on, it's just a matter of what the words will become.

And Dunkin' Donuts are the best!