Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER [LWN.net]

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 15, 2017 13:41 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER by anselm
Parent article: Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

> So what? English doesn't really have grammatical gender or inflection – for verbs, tacking on an “s” to get third-person singular verb forms is about as difficult as it gets

I am, thou art, he is, we/you/they are.

Note that it is all the *common* verbs that tend to have weird forms!

Cheers,
Wol

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Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 17, 2017 12:46 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, the common verbs tend to be the oddballs in many languages. Now this is just a hunch, but my suspicion is that they are irregular because there are pressures to makes these words as short as possible due to their frequency of use and they end up getting so short that the normal rules don't apply anymore. If it were only uncommon verbs that we're irregular, I feel like they'd be pressured over time to be more regular. Examples include words or terms originally borrowed from other languages and then forced into the native patterns and even pronunciation.

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 20, 2017 23:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The other possibility is that they are irregular because they are very commonly used and thus are invariably learned very early by every speaker, and used so often by all interlocutors of all early speakers that there is little room for misinterpretation: everyone converges on the same behaviour. The root of all language change is innovations, often rooted in misinterpretations, by language learners, and (with a few exceptions such as present-day English and various creoles and trade tongues) that mostly means young children. Parts of language that are highly used around children will tend to smooth away the childrens' errors (many of which are regularizations of irregular forms: oh look pronouns are highly irregular).

For an example, look at English pronouns. They're inflected, they're fairly bizarre in all sorts of ways, and they are almost unchangeable. People have been trying to introduce a third-person gender-neutral pronoun less contorted than singular they for centuries. It has never caught on, and it likely never will, because pronouns are nearly universal among the community of English speakers, so there is little dialectical diversity to exploit in generating new pronouns, and all early speakers learn the same things (and, at the least, correctly learn their dialect's variation).

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 17, 2017 14:26 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I am, thou art, he is, we/you/they are.

That's clutching at straws. In English, “to be” and “to have” are among the very few outliers, and nobody actually uses “thou art” anymore.

Compare that to German sein: ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, wir sind, ihr seid, sie sind (present tense) and ich war, du warst, er/sie/es war, wir waren, ihr wart, sie waren (past tense). Oh, and there's a subjunctive mode, too: ich sei, du seist, er/sie/es sei, wir seien, ihr seiet, sie seien. Oops, actually there's two of them: ich wäre, du wärst, er/sie/es wäre, wir wären, ihr wäret, sie wären. And of course there are composite forms for present perfect, past perfect, and future I and II (although they work basically like the same forms in English – German and English are related, after all). But the past participle of sein that you need for these is the very obvious gewesen. Any questions?