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Etymology of English irregular forms tends to answer the question where do irregulars come from. As a language, English is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic variety, although its current vocabulary includes words from many languages. The Anglo-Saxon roots can be seen in the similarity of numbers in English and German, particularly
seven/sieben
,
eight/acht
,
nine/neun
and
ten/zehn
. Pronouns are also cognate:
I/ich
;
thou/du
;
we/wir
;
she/sie
. However, language change has eroded many grammatical elements, such as the noun case system, which is greatly simplified in Modern English; and certain elements of vocabulary, much of which is borrowed from French. Though more than half of the words in English either come from the French language or have a French cognate, most of the common words used are still of Germanic origin
.
When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they brought their Norman language with them. During the Anglo-Norman period, which united insular and continental territories, the ruling class spoke Anglo-Norman, while the peasants spoke the English of the time. Anglo-Norman was the conduit for the introduction of French into England, aided by the circulation of Langue d'oïl literature from France. This led to many paired words of French and English origin. For example, beef is cognate with modern French bœuf , meaning cow ; veal with veau , meaning calf ; pork with porc , meaning pig ; and poultry with poulet , meaning chicken . In this situation, the foodstuff has the Norman name, and the animal the Anglo-Saxon name, since it was the Norman rulers who ate meat（meat was an expensive commodity and could rarely be afforded by the Anglo-Saxons）, and the Anglo-Saxons who farmed the animals.
English words of more than two syllables are likely to come from French, often with modified terminations. For example, the French words for syllable , modified , terminations and example are syllabe , modifié , terminaisons and exemple . In many cases, the English form of the word is more conservative（that is, has changed less）than its French form.
English has proven accommodating to words from many languages. Scientific terminology relies heavily on words of Latin and Greek origin. Spanish has contributed many words, particularly in the southwestern United States. Examples include buckaroo from vaquero or “ cowboy ”, alligator from el lagarto or“ the lizard ”, and rodeo . Cuddle , eerie and greed come from Scots; honcho , sushi and tsunami from Japanese; dim sum , gung ho , kowtow , kumquat , ketchup , and typhoon from Cantonese Chinese; behemoth , hallelujah , Satan , jubilee and rabbi from Hebrew; taiga , sable and sputnik from Russian; cornea , algorithm , cotton , hazard , muslin , jar , sofa and mosque from Arabic; kampong and amok from Malay; and boondocks from the Tagalog word bundok .
Accordingly, English irregular forms are derived from several sources of languages and their irregular forms have been long preserved during the evolution of language.
Old English contained about twice as many irregular verbs as Modern English, including now obsolete forms such as cleave-clove , crow-crew , abide-abode , childe-chid , and geld-gelt . Bybee（1985）examined the current frequencies of the surviving descendants of the irregulars in Old English and found that it was the low-frequency verbs that were converted to regular forms over the centuries.
Today one can actually feel the psychological cause of this historical change by considering past tense forms that are low in frequency. Most low-frequency irregulars sound stilted or strange, such as smite-smote, slay-slew, bid-bade, spell-spelt , and tread-trod （in American English）, and one can predict that they will eventually go the way of chid and crew . In some cases, a form is familiar enough to block the regular version, but not quite familiar enough to sound natural, and speakers are left with no clear choice for that slot in the conjugational paradigm. For example, many speakers report that neither of the past participle forms for stride , strided and stridden , sounds quite right. In contrast, low-frequency regular past tense forms always sound perfectly natural（or at least no more unnatural than the stems themselves）. No one has trouble with the preterite or participle of abate-abated , abrogate-abrogated , and so on.
Most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems. What is today an exception actually followed a set, normal rule long ago. When that rule fell into disuse, some verbs kept the old conjugation. An example of this is the word kept , which before the Great Vowel Shift fell into a class of words where the vowel in keep（then pronounced kehp）was shortened in the past tense. Similar words, such as peep , that arose after the Vowel Shift, use the regular-ed suffix. Groups of irregular verbs include: The remaining strong verbs, which display the vowel shift called ablaut and sometimes have a past participle in -en or -n: e. g., ride/rode/ridden . This verb group was inherited from the parent Proto-Germanic language, and ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European language, and was originally an entirely regular system. In Old English and in modern German it is still more or less regular, but in modern English the system of strong verb classes has almost entirely collapsed.
Weak verbs that have been subjected to sound changes over the course of the history of English that has rendered them irregular acquired a long vowel in the present stem, but kept a short vowel in the preterite and past participle, e. g., hear/heard/heard .
Weak verbs that show the vowel shift are sometimes called “Rückumlaut” in the present tense, e. g., think/thought .
Weak verbs that end in a final -t or -d that made the addition of the weak suffix -ed seem redundant, e. g., cost/cost/cost .
There is a handful of surviving preterite present verbs. These can be distinguished from the rest because their third person simple present singular（the he, she , or it form）does not take a final -s. These are the remnants of what was once a fairly large Indo-European class of verbs that were conjugated in the preterite or perfect tense with present tense meaning. All of the surviving verbs of this class are modal verbs, that is, a class of auxiliary verbs or quasi-auxiliaries, e. g., can/could/could .
Verbs that contain suppletive forms form one or more of their tenses from an entirely different root. Be is one of these, as in go/went/gone （where went is originally from the verb to wend）. By the 15th century in southern England, wende （wend）had become synonymous with go , but its infinitive and present tense forms had ceased to be in frequent use. With a waning, morphing preterite tense（yode）, go was ripe to receive a new preterite—the preterite of wende , the familiar went . （Online Etymology Dictionary）
Other verbs have been changed due to ease of pronunciation so that it is shorter or more closely corresponds to how it is spelt.
Some weak verbs have been the subject of contractions, e. g., have/had/had .
There are fewer strong verbs and irregular verbs in Modern English than there are in Old English. Slowly over time the number of irregular verbs is decreasing. The force of analogy tends to reduce the number of irregular verbs over time. This fact explains the reason that irregular verbs tend to be the most commonly used ones; verbs that are more rarely heard are more likely to switch to being regular. For instance, a verb like ablate was once irregular, but today ablated is the standard usage. Today irregular and standard forms often coexist, a sign that the irregular form may be on the wane. For instance, seeing spelled instead of spelt or strived instead of strove is common.
On the other hand, contraction and sound changes can increase their number. Most of the strong verbs were regular, in that they fell into a conventional plan of conjugation in Old English; there are so few of them left in contemporary English that they seem irregular to us.
Loanwords are words adopted by the speakers of one language from a different language（the source language）. A loanword can also be called a borrowing. The abstract noun borrowing refers to the process of speakers adopting words from a source language into their native language.
English has many loanwords, due to England coming in contacts with numerous invaders in the Middle Ages, and English becoming a trade language in the 18th century. Today the traces of loanwords in English can be easily found particularly in the English irregular plurals since a significant number of irregular plurals are borrowed from other cultures. For instance, words from Latin that end in -a change -a to -ae（e. g., formula becomes formulae in the mathematical and chemical senses）; words from Greek that end in -ma change -ma to -mata（e. g., stigma becomes stigmata in all senses but the sense of “disgrace”）; words from French that end in -u add an x（e. g., chateau becomes chateaux ）; words from Hebrew that add -im or -ot（e. g., cherub becomes cherubim ）; etc.