Rate of regularizing English verbs
johndcook.com
johndcook.com
Also, there are words which get irregularized, like "sneak"->"snuck" which was "introduced in the 19th century as a nonstandard regional variant of sneaked" (see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1931). "Dive"->"dove" is another recent US irregularization (see http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.com/2013/07/thro... ).
Hmm, I recall another verb which dealt with religion (perhaps part of a religious service?) which was regular, but spelled quite similar to an irregular verb. Then as it became less common, people started conjugating it as the similar looking irregular verb.
I just can't remember that word.
It says "each trajectory was sui generis; we observed no characteristic shape" in how a verb is made regular or irregular. It observes:
> Though irregulars generally yield to regulars, two verbs did the opposite: light/lit and wake/woke. Both were irregular in Middle English, were mostly regular by 1800, and subsequently backtracked and are irregular again today. The fact that these verbs have been going back and forth for nearly 500 years highlights the gradual nature of the underlying process.
> Still, there was at least one instance of rapid progress by an irregular form. Presently, 1% of the English speaking population switches from ‘sneaked’ to ‘snuck’ every year...