Re: should . be followed by doublespace?

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Wednesday, August 7, Craig Dickson did write:

<SNIP>

> This is consistent, but not traditionally considered correct. Natural
> languages, sadly, are not generally exemplars of clean and elegant
> design. Punctuation is the least of most languages' problems in this
> regard; irregular verbs are much nastier.

Truly.  

There's a fun lesson here: in most languages (certainly the ones that
I've studied), irregular verbs were, at one time, regular.  However,
regular sound changes have modified the forms so the regular inflections
have been lost.  There is pressure within the language to make these
irregular forms more regular (i.e., shifting from `proven' to `proved'),
but this sort of shift takes a long time.  So, in short, most of the
irregular features of language are due to historical reasons.

Moral of the story: backward compatibility causes more problems than it
solves!  :-)

Richard