Quote:
Originally Posted by laepelba
Thanks!! (Perikles...)  |
You flatter me. I have no specific answer other than very generally, the original Indo-European language from which most European languages derive was monumentally complicated in terms of syntax and grammar. There has been a general tendency over thousands of years to simplify. Take for example nouns - there were probably a dozen case endings, reduced to 5 for classical Greek, and 8 for Latin. There were probably many genders which quite early on were reduced to 3: masculine, feminine, neuter. There were huge numbers of declensions which reduced to about 14 different ones in Greek.
Verbs used to be far more complicated: In Greek there are more moods than in Spanish and the most basic verbs, hence to oldest, are all effectively irregular. Verbs invented later tended to be far more regular. A similar pattern can be seen in other languages.
The overall pattern is that very generally the older a verb the more irregular it is going to be. (Note that when a new verb is invented in Spanish it is regular with an
-ar ending - another piece of simplification.) It follows that the most common verbs are more likely to be the irregular ones.
I think this phenomenon is more relevant to Indo-European languages than others. Turkish (a member of the Finnish-Hungarian language group) has for example only one irregular verb,
to be and other languages have no irregular verbs at all. But I'm out of my depth here.