A fairly interesting article about Harvard scientists using mathematical models to predict how certain verbs will “regularize”* over time. Their theory is that often-used verbs like “to be”, “to take”, and “to think” will retain their irregular past tense conjugations (”was”, “took”, “thought”), but unpopular irregular verbs like “to smite”, will regularize themselves over time (going from “smote” to “smited”). Pretty interesting stuff.
* “Regularized”, or regular verbs generally end in “-ed” in their past tense.