Most of us (Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells and his friends aside) understand that language evolves, but now that evolution can be measured. A group of mathematicians at Harvard have been looking at the speed at which irregular verbs become regularized. English, being a very messy language, is a good subject for study. It also has a large corpus of literature stretching all the way back to The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. And the conclusion that these math guys have come up with is that verbs evolve faster if they are less commonly used. If a verb has, say, an unusual ending in the past tense, people will forget that, and start to use the then incorrect but more regular ending; but if the verb is in regular use then the unusual conjugation will be remembered for much longer. The results are apparently so good that they are saying with confidence that verbs regularize at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.

So there’s an SF idea for you. If you story is set 1000 years in the future, maybe your characters should be saying “I taked the shuttle, geted to Mars, and doed what I had to do.”

Or maybe not. Maybe you should write a story about how modern communication and storage technology, not to mention 300-year life spans, have fossilized language development.