Sorry, one sentence there was badly worded and implied something I didn't mean. I should have said - ' without interference from pedants, roots purists or top-down reformers'

To put it another way, you can almost always replace 'substantial' with 'large(amount of)' or 'a lot of', and 'substantive' with 'important', as we can see if we look at their main collocates (words that are most often used together with them)

Main collocates for 'substantial' include:
number, amount, evidence, increase, portion part etc

Main collocates for 'substantive' include:
changes, law, issues, rules, requirements, rights

http://www.netspeak.org/#query=substantial+%253F
http://www.netspeak.org/#query=substantive+%253F

Probably most languages have irregular verbs, certainly the one I've come across have; this is a natural part of language development, and I don't think you can come up with one all-defining reason. This is what Etymology Online has to say about 'went', for example:

'Originally past tense and past participle of wend ...went developed from c.1200 and began to replace older past tenses of go. By c.1500 they were fully employed in that function, and wend was given a new past tense form, wended.'

In my experience, irregular verb forms do not cause EFL/ESL learners any great problems, apart perhaps from beginners; it's the use of tenses that give them the most trouble.

What's more it's a perfectly natural aspect of native-speaker learning that children sort out the main rules first, and then from about the age of four onwards, work out the irregularities.

The fact that English has relatively few verb forms (maximum 5, and with verbs like 'put' only 3), and that irregular verbs are amongst the ones we use most often, really stops this from being a problem. You Americans have a saying, after all, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

Much more worrying is the idea that politicians should be involved in deciding the rules of English. It is to the great glory of English that all attempts to foist an Academy on us have failed. And it wouldn't be the 'grammar nazis' who would be protesting; they seem to rather like neat and tidy solutions. It would be ordinary speakers like me, who simply want to continue speaking the natural English we know and love, without interference from pedants, ethnic purists or reformers. Mess with somebody's language and you're messing with the whole basis of their culture.

It's not only English speakers who don't like government interference. The German spelling reforms of 1996 ran into a lot of flak, and it's my understanding that some of the main newspapers have gone back to the old system, or at least a half-way house. And a French law brought in in 1999 or 2000, restricting the use of English in commercial signs etc, had to be redrafted a year later, limiting it to government agencies only.

If people want a nice regular language, there's always Esperanto, but most of us prefer a language with a history and a culture, (irregular) warts and all.

@Chris Beaver - why on earth 'as an English teacher' would it drive you crazy to hear a verb pronounced in its normal regular way? As an English teacher you will of course know that there are three ways of pronouncing regular past forms:

1. silent e followed by 't' - worked, hoped, dropped, pushed, slipped
these follow the voiceless consonants - p, k, s, ch, h, f, x, h

2. silent e followed by 'd' - played, called, damaged, encouraged, opened, stayed
these follow a larger group of voiced consonants and vowel sounds

3. voiced e followed by 'd' when the final consonant of the main verb form is t (as in jayles' examples - and in texted), or d, as in - sounded, graduated, hated, provided, treated

Texted is not at all like the verb worked, where the base verb form ends with the voiceless consonant k. The verb text ends with a t (sorry to state the obvious) so its past form naturally follows all other regular verbs ending in 't', and the final syllable is pronounced, just as in all others of that group.

http://esl.about.com/od/beginnerpronunciation/a/past_pronounce_3.htm

For fans of Steptoe and Son, heard in Series 2, Episode 2 - 'The Bath', first broadcast in January 1963: 'If he thinks I'm going to live under the stairs, he's got another think coming'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zba7emQgR6g - it's at about 21.40

@Budahust - Why do we say 9.30pm, but not half past nine pm? Or five past ten and twenty to eleven, but six minutes past ten and twenty-one minutes to eleven? These are just some of life's little mysteries.

I would guess the serious answer to your question is - because the whole number without the minutes or quarters might have sounded a bit bare, and in any case it was a way of clearly differentiating it from the rest.

@Mani - 'would' has lots of uses apart from in conditionals - here I would say that it softens the statement, makes it a little more tentative - it's often used with words like 'think, imagine, say, suggest, recommend, appear, seem'

In your second example, you still need to keep the second would - 'I would think either would work'

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2012/02/word-corner-would.html

'does get a bit of a mention in Fowler's 3rd Edition, where he talks of 'sentence adjectives' - sorry, where the editor R.W.Burchfield talks of ... - Fowler had of course been dead for a long time.

Hi Jim, I teach foreign students, and in British-based EFL there is absolutely no controversy over sentence adverbs and their use is actively taught. What's more, none of the standard British dictionaries learners use have this use of 'more important', and they all give examples with 'more' or 'most importantly'.

Although Oxford Online Dictionaries do list this use for 'most important', it's interesting that they label important as a sentence adverb in this case, so they're obviously not happy with the adjective argument either.

It's not an entirely American issue, and does get a bit of a mention in Fowler's 3rd Edition, where he talks of 'sentence adjectives', but that's eighteen years old, and attitudes towards sentence adverbs have mellowed quite a bit since then.

I've just done a little research at The Guardian, my regular newspaper (it's the sort of thing I do!) . There were 146 instances of 'Most important', of which nine were being used to start a clause, the rest being used as normal adjectives. For 'Most importantly', there were 96 instances, all but possibly two being used as sentence adverbs.

There were also over 700 instances of 'more importantly' at the British National Corpus, but I'm not going to plough through the 2000 odd examples of 'more important' to see how many are being used as clause openers, but if the ratio is the same as at The Guardian, it would be about 120.

Whatever the mavens over there and Grammar Girl ( I know the site well) say, the adjective version sounds strange to me, and 'more importantly' seems to me to be much more standard in British English, so I'll stick with that. But thanks for alerting me to yet another controversy - it's all grist to the mill.

@Brus - you might be interested in my blog post on the subjunctive, where, through the use of tables, layout and colour, I think I've been able to put things more clearly than I have here. It also includes a discussion of the 'were to' construction, and the was/ were debate.

http://random-idea-english.blogspot.com/2011/06/exploring-grammar-subjunctive.html