The video discusses the quirks of the English language, specifically irregular verbs, and how they deviate from Zipf's Law, which states that a small number of words are very common, while most words are rare. Irregular verbs, however, are an exception, with many being common despite not following the usual pattern of verb conjugation.
The video explains that irregular verbs originated from Proto-Indo-European and were later influenced by Proto-Germanic. Over time, many verbs became regularized, but some remained irregular.
Researchers studied the evolution of verbs and found that the frequency of usage affects a word's survival. Common verbs tend to remain irregular, while rare ones become regular.
The video also touches on the concept of natural selection in language, where words that are not frequently used are more likely to become regular.
The video concludes by discussing the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool that plots the frequency of words over time, and how it can be used to study language and cultural changes.
Finally, the video promotes the Google Ngram Viewer and the Great American Read, a PBS series that explores why people love to read and allows viewers to vote on their favorite novel.
Here are the key facts extracted from the text:
1. The verb "to read" has different meanings depending on its tense.
2. The poem "The Verbs in English Are a Fright" by Richard Letterer highlights the irregularities of the English language.
3. Most verbs in English are regular, with their past tense formed by adding a letter or two to the end.
4. Irregular verbs, on the other hand, do not follow this pattern.
5. Linguist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that not all words are created equal, with some being used much more frequently than others.
6. Zipf's Law states that the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank in the list of most frequently used words.
7. The 10th most frequently used word is 10 times more common than the 100th most used word.
8. The English language has around 200 irregular verbs, which is a tiny fraction of the total number of verbs.
9. Irregular verbs are more likely to be used frequently, while regular verbs are more likely to be used less often.
10. The oldest verbs in the English language are more likely to be irregular, while newer verbs are more likely to be regular.
11. The Proto-Indo-European language is the ancestor of many modern languages, including English.
12. In this language, the meaning and tense of words could be changed by swapping vowel sounds.
13. This system is still seen in some irregular verbs, such as "dig" and "dug".
14. The Proto-Germanic language added verbs to the language that didn't fit this pattern, and invented a new way of signifying the past tense by adding "ta" or "da" sounds to the end.
15. As English grew from this Proto-Germanic language, newly added words became automatically regular, following this new rule.
16. Many older verbs began to switch from the old way to the new, and by the time the story of Beowulf was written, three out of every four verbs had been regularized.
17. Researchers tracked the evolution of 177 verbs that were irregular at the time Beowulf was written and found that 79 had regularized by the time of Modern English.
18. The trait that predicted whether or not a verb would become regular was how often it was used.
19. The most frequently used verbs tend to stay irregular, while the most rarely used become regular.
20. A word like "stink" that's used once every 10 to 100 thousand words has a 50% chance of regularizing within 700 years.
21. A more common word like "drink" will take more like 5,000 years to regularize.
22. The Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that plots the frequency of strings of one or more words by year found in millions of digitized books.
23. The Google Books project contains 25 million scanned books stretching back more than 500 years.
24. The Google Ngram Viewer can be used to study how human culture has changed over the centuries.