It's (supposedly) pronunciation changes that cause irregular words, right? You start with a regular rule, pronunciation of all words change so that the rule no longer works, all the uncommon words quickly regularize on a new rule, and what's left is irregular.
It's been a while since my last linguistics class, but that seems like the natural result of words retaining their pronunciation roughly according to how often they're used. That sounds like a continuous process we should expect to slow as pronunciation change slows (due to recorded media), but not necessarily to stop at some cut-off point.
It's been a while since my last linguistics class, but that seems like the natural result of words retaining their pronunciation roughly according to how often they're used. That sounds like a continuous process we should expect to slow as pronunciation change slows (due to recorded media), but not necessarily to stop at some cut-off point.