In the windswept badlands of Montana, a paleontologist brushes dust from a dinosaur bone. This bone is a remnant, a clue to a world that vanished millions of years ago. The study of how this bone—and the organism it belonged to—decayed, became buried, and turned to stone is called taphonomy. It’s the science of fossilization, the story of what happens after death.

But what if we applied this idea to something less tangible? What if we looked for fossils not in stone, but in speech? Welcome to the fascinating concept of linguistic taphonomy: the study of how words, sounds, and grammatical rules decay, erode, and fossilize over time, leaving behind baffling relics in our modern language.

The Life and Death of a Word

Languages are not static. They are living, breathing systems in a constant state of flux. They grow, they borrow, they adapt, and parts of them die. But death in language isn’t always a clean disappearance. More often, it’s a slow process of decay, like an ancient ruin gradually being reclaimed by the forest.

The “geological pressures” and “microbial decay” of language are forces like:

• Phonetic Erosion: Sounds, especially in unstressed syllables, get worn down and smoothed over, like pebbles in a stream.
• Analogy: The human brain’s powerful desire for patterns causes speakers to regularize irregular forms. This is the force that makes a child say “goed” instead of “went.”
• Reanalysis: Speakers misinterpret a word or phrase’s structure and create a new form based on that misunderstanding.

Over centuries, these forces grind down old grammatical systems, but they don’t always erase them completely. Instead, they leave behind fossils: peculiar words and “broken” rules that make no sense in the modern system but are perfect clues to an ancient one.

Excavating the Fossils in English

You don’t need a pickaxe and brush to be a linguistic paleontologist. The fossils are all around you, hidden in the most common words. Let’s dig a few up.

Fossil #1: The Ghost Plurals (men, feet, geese)

Ask an English speaker how to make a plural, and they’ll say, “Add an -s.” Dog becomes dogs, cat becomes cats, house becomes houses. This rule is alive and well—it’s what we call productive. You can apply it to new words like smartphones or blogs.

So why do we say man/men, foot/feet, tooth/teeth, and goose/geese? Are they just random mistakes that stuck?

Not at all. These are fossils of a long-dead Germanic pluralization system called i-mutation (or umlaut). In Old English, the ancestor of our modern language, some plurals were formed by adding an -i or -j suffix. The presence of this high front vowel in the suffix caused the vowel in the root of the word to shift forward and upward in the mouth to anticipate it.

• Old English fōt (foot) became fēt (feet) from the proto-form *fōtiz.
• Old English gōs (goose) became gēs (geese) from *gōsiz.
• Old English s (man) became menn (men) from *manniz.

Over time, the forces of phonetic erosion wore away the final -i suffix. It decayed and disappeared completely. But the vowel change it caused? That remained, preserved forever in the word—a perfect linguistic fossil. The grammatical logic is gone, but its effect is set in stone.

Fossil #2: The Strong Verb Graveyard (sang, drove, broke)

Similar to plurals, our standard past tense rule is to add “-ed.” Walk/walked, talk/talked, type/typed. Yet we’re surrounded by a legion of “irregular” verbs: sing/sang/sung, drive/drove/driven, break/broke/broken.

These aren’t irregular; they’re just old. They are the last surviving members of a system called ablaut, which dates all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, the great-ancestor of English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian. In this ancient system, tenses were not marked with endings but with a change in the root vowel itself.

The “-ed” ending is a newer, simpler, and more efficient Germanic innovation. For the last 1,500 years, this new system has been slowly conquering the old one. Verbs that were once “strong” (using ablaut) have become “weak” (using “-ed”). For instance, people once said help/holp and climb/clomb. Today, analogy has pushed them into the regular camp: help/helped and climb/climbed.

The verbs like sing, drive, and break are the dinosaur bones of this ancient system—the ones too common and too well-entrenched to be eroded away by analogy.

Fossil #3: The Grammatical Ghost (Woe is me)

Sometimes it’s not a word, but a whole grammatical structure that fossilizes. Old English had a robust case system, much like modern German or Latin. Nouns and pronouns changed their endings depending on their role in a sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, etc.).

Today, that system is almost entirely gone. We use word order and prepositions like to, for, and with to show a word’s function. But look closely at our pronouns: I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them.

That distinction is a fossil. He is a remnant of the old nominative case (for subjects), while him is a conflation of the old accusative (direct object) and dative (indirect object) cases. We don’t think in terms of “dative case” anymore, but we are using its fossilized form every time we say, “Give the book to him.”

You can see an even clearer fossil in the archaic phrase, “Woe is me.” In modern syntax, this feels wrong. We’d say, “Woe is to me.” But “Woe is me” preserves a perfect, fossilized dative construction: “Woe is [to] me.” The grammar is a ghost, haunting a modern sentence.

Language Is a City Built on Ruins

Why does any of this matter? Because linguistic taphonomy reveals that language is not a pristine, logical invention. It’s a messy, chaotic, beautiful ruin. It’s a modern city built directly on top of the foundations of older, forgotten cities.

The “exceptions” and “irregularities” that frustrate language learners are not mistakes. They are stories. They are echoes of our linguistic ancestors, whispers of grammatical rules that governed the tongues of people a thousand years ago. By studying these fossilized forms, we can reconstruct how our predecessors spoke and thought.

So the next time you say children (a rare double-plural fossil!), feet, or sang, take a moment. You’re not just speaking; you’re an archeologist, dusting off a relic from a lost world.