Why do languages break their rules so much? (e.g. irregular verbs)
In: 10
Because those rules aren’t actually rules.
The language developed just from people talking to each other a whole bunch. The “rules” were something people came up with after the fact to try to explain what had developed.
Linguists are largely descriptivist, not prescriptivist. That means they’re not telling people how to speak, they’re just describing the way that people speak. Linguists don’t generally describe things like slang as “incorrect”, they describe it as “nonstandard”, because they know that what’s a curious bit of dialect now may eventually become the norm.
The reason we speak English the way we speak it now is because our ancestors broke the rules enough that the changes became the new norm. Using “you” as a singular was incorrect until enough people did it that it was now the norm. If we all followed the “rules” of our language then we’d still be able to read Beowulf.
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