How do languages change? Certain errors persist; words, expressions, conjugations, entire tenses fade. Perhaps we hear something new, snatch up a cute saying on a trip abroad or adopt a locution we hear on TV. Scorn gives way to apathy: soon we can't remember how we used to say things, and what was once an exception is now accepted; soon, everyone else is saying it, too.
Some people assume that one of the driving forces behind language change is laziness, and that more difficult constructions will always fall away in favor of easier ones. I'm not sure that's true: after all, two of the most common verbs, "to be" and "to have," are irregular in all the language I know, and therefore more difficult to learn and retain, but because we use them so often we remember their forms and aren't tempted to police them into the standard mold (I am, you am, he/she/it ams, we am, you am, they am; I ammed, I was amming, etc). So I think frequency has something to do with forestalling language change, or at least with helping difficulties endure. Perversely, frequency can also lead to language change, at least according to wikipedia, which blames the irregularity of "to be" on its very prevalence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be). The more something reproduces (ie, the more a word is spoken and written), the more chances it has to mutate.
Recently, a coworker of mine who studied historical linguistics explained the phenomenon of language change to me in richer terms. According to him, there are two forces constantly pushing against languages that work to change them: the first is the set of phonetic rules that dictate which sounds precede or follow one another. Now here's where it gets sticky: sometimes, through chance, a verb conjugation that is inflectionally correctly may be phonetically incorrect. This verb conjugation will have to be modified: it will become irregular. So the force of phonetics is a central source of irregular verb conjugations, plurals, possessives, etc. In an attempt to regularize the sound patterns of the words themselves, morphemic patterns are disrupted.
The other force at work is the tendency that speakers have to regularize verbs by analogy. It's why little kids say "I sleeped." Why should some words not follow the rules that others do? As these two forces do battle for the souls of verbs, irregularities rise like air bubbles, only to be smoothed out down the road.
Furthermore, certain changes are cyclical, occurring and reccurring like seasons. The example he gave was a comparison between the French passé composé and futur simple tenses. The first is what we refer to as the present perfect in English: I have burnt the pie, and is made up of the conjugated auxiliary verb "to be" or "to have" followed by the past participle of the main verb. The second is a future tense for which we have no equivalent. Je brûlerai le gâteau means "I will burn the pie" but looks something like "I burnill the pie," in that the ending of the auxiliary verb has been stuck onto the end of the main verb. In the passé composé , only the auxiliary verb is conjugated. In the futur simple, the main verb itself is conjugated.
So learning and using the passé composé is in some ways easier than the futur simple, because there is far less conjugating to do, and, as everyone knows, conjugating is a pain.
HOWEVER, some of you may have noticed that the endings of the verbs in the futur simple are the same as the endings of the various French conjugations of "to have." The reason for this is that long ago, in Latin, the future was formed like this: "I read will." Over time, those words got smushed together, so what was a simple conjugation (infinitive + auxiliary verb) became a somewhat messier affair. Perhaps, in a few hundred years, the passé composé will be a similar mush; perhaps other complicated tenses will sprout auxiliary verbs only to absorb them further down the line.
I thought about this news for a while; I found it somewhat astonishing. All of a sudden, the thick, static bodies of verbs flew apart and their inner bits seemed to fill the air, and all these shreds still shift before me, joining and shedding each other like the shapes at the end of a kaleidoscope.
But the question remains: who, exactly, is turning the lens?
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