You might hypothesize that this movement from strong to weak verbs would
be over and done with so many hundreds of years after it began, but in fact,
it is still moving forward – and backward. Pinker’s summary of the status of
strong or irregular verbs is quite poetic:
Do irregular verbs have a future? At first glance, the prospects do not
seem good. Old English had more than twice as many irregular verbs as
we do today. Not only is the irregular class losing members by
emigration, it is not gaining new ones by immigration. When new
verbs enter English via onomatopoeia (to ding, to ping), borrowings
from other languages (deride and succumb from Latin), and
conversions from nouns (fly out), the regular rule has first dibs on
them. The language ends up with dinged, pinged, derided, succumbed,
and flied out, not dang, pang, derode, succame, or flew out.
(Pinker 1998)Weak verbs have been metamorphizing into strong verb forms for a very
long time. Pinker attributes this to the fact that strong verbs are generated
by pattern, and human beings are prone to playing with patterns. Studies of
children’s speech regularly shows how they experiment, trying strong verb
patterns on weak verbs (and weak on strong) to see how they’ll fit. Bybee
and Slobin provide examples from children’s speech: bring– brang, bite–
bote, and wipe–wope, but anyone who has had a part in raising a child will
have their own examples. From the notes taken while my daughter was in
this stage of language acquisition, for example: He tooked Eliza’s book, Her
dress is all broked, and Look I clumed the stairs barefeeted.
Adults find misapplications like these endearing or funny, but sometimes
a strong rule pattern will stick to a weak verb. For example, there are areas
in Great Britain and the U.S. where sneaked has become snuck, dived is now
dove, and dragged is drug, to the horror of prescriptivists. In my own
speech, snuck and dove are firmly entrenched.
This variation is active and vigorous, and has been widely documented. A
Google search “dragged or drug?” brings up a million hits, which indicates
real confusion in the language community. Speakers often show this kind of
confusion and breakdown of contrasts when changes in progress are
solidifying. An infamous example of such a case is the difference between
lie and lay, a distinction that is now largely lost.