English is full of "all the weird edge-cases" because people want it that way. Consider that we could use '-ed' as the past tense for all words: runned, sitted

English is full of "all the weird edge-cases" because people want it that way. Consider that we could use '-ed' as the past tense for all words: runned, sitted, drinked, eated, standed, twisted, cutted, turned, seeed, heared, beated, beginned, bended, digged, hurted, holded, selled, sended, shaked, singed, spended, standed, stinked, teached, telled, winned. My first reaction is that it sounds like babytalk, because the only place those are used is by children before they learn to speak 'properly'. They are understandable - if we wanted more regular language, we could just switch to speaking more regular English. Nobody could stop us. We don't, conclusion: we don't want that. The irregular cases are partly there because they have been worn into being that way, rather than having that worn away, like r/DesirePaths[1] are the paths people want to take instead of the paths prescribed for them. Worn through frequent use and it being shorter to say eat/ate than eat/eated. We signal adultness, nativeness, in-group membership, social status, educational status by knowing and using the weird edge cases. Poor people say "baarff" instead of "bath", foreign people say "walk dog" instead of "walk the dog", educated people can spell and use Latin and Greek origin words. In a similar way that jelly and ice cream is famously a children's dessert while mouldy cheese on herb crackers is an adult dessert. Pop goes the weasel is a children's tune and Mozart is an educated adult's composer. Spot the Dog is a children's story, War and Peace isn't. A language which has "all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river" is also a Sistine Chapel where all the details have worn away and the whole ceiling is a smooth and beautiful brown, or a Mozart where all the distinct instruments have worn away and the whole tune is a smooth and pure sine wave. People would rather visit a landscape or a church than an empty warehouse - the mind likes details, something to grip on. The programming languages where everything is TokiPona, it's all parentheses, it's all CPU instructions, it's all stack primitives, it's all array transforms, are not the popular ones; when everything looks the same you have a hard time telling where you are or expressing things which are different, differently. A centrally planned "people's language" is about as desirable as a centrally planned "people's car"; one generation after everyone speaks Esperanto, everyone would speak their own dialect of Esperanto with extra chrome, alloy wheels, turbo charger, cutdown exhaust, go-faster stripes, custom decals, fat tyres - the original language, the variant that's more flowery and poetic, the one that's more modern and refined, the one that's more minimal and purer, the one which is more casual and slangy and youthful and irreverant and less regular, the one with more regional or historic loan words, the one spoken by the upper classes or the famous people, etc. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DesirePaths/