Why do languages break their rules so much? (e.g. irregular verbs)

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Why do languages break their rules so much? (e.g. irregular verbs)

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Anonymous 0 Comments

>Why do languages break their rules so much? (e.g. irregular verbs)

The “rules” to which you refer are not a recipe or an instruction how to *use* a language, they’re always just a makeshift collection of heuristics to roughly *describe* that language.

That’s because with very very few exceptions like Esperanto, the language **always came first** and at some point some folk got together to find some regularities and patterns to describe and formalize it. There always *are* patterns, but not nearly as many as you could expect from something that was deliberately constructed with patterns and rules in mind from the very beginning – because that’s not what a language is, a language grows and changes naturally and isn’t constructed.

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