- Old English morphology
The morphology of the
Old English language is quite different from that of Modern English, predominantly by being much more highly inflected. It more closely resembles modern German, which has over the centuries been more conservative than English.Verbs
Verbs in Old English are divided into strong or weak verbs. Strong verbs indicate tense by a change in the quality of a vowel, while weak verbs indicate tense by the addition of an ending.
trong verbs
Strong verbs use the Germanic form of conjugation known as "ablaut". In this form of conjugation, the stem of the word changes to indicate the tense. Verbs like this persist in modern English, for example "sing, sang, sung" is a strong verb, as are "swim, swam, swum" and "choose, chose, chosen". The root portion of the word changes rather than its ending. In Old English, there were seven major classes of strong verb; each class has its own pattern of stem changes. Learning these is often a challenge for students of the language, though English speakers may see connections between the old verb classes and their modern forms.
The classes had the following distinguishing features to their infinitive stems:
- ī + 1 consonant.
- ēo or ū + 1 consonant.
- Originally e + 2 consonants (This was no longer the case by the time of written Old English).
- e + 1 consonant (usually l or r, plus the verb "brecan" 'to break').
- e + 1 consonant (usually a stop or a fricative).
- a + 1 consonant.
- No specific rule — first and second have identical stems (ē or ēo), and the infinitive and the past participle also have the same stem.
Weak verbs
Weak verbs are formed by adding alveolar ("t" or "d") endings to the stem for the past and past-participle tenses. Some examples are "love, loved" or "look, looked".
Originally, the weak ending was used to form the preterite of informal, noun-derived verbs such as often emerge in conversation and which have no established system of stem-change. By nature, these verbs were almost always transitive, and even today, most weak verbs are transitive verbs formed in the same way. However, as English came into contact with non-Germanic languages, it invariably borrowed useful verbs which lacked established stem-change patterns. Rather than invent and standardize new classes or learn foreign conjugations, English speakers simply applied the weak ending to the foreign bases.
The linguistic trends of borrowing foreign verbs and verbalizing nouns have greatly increased the number of weak verbs over the last 1200 years. Some verbs that were originally strong (for example "help, holp, holpen") have become weak by analogy; most foreign verbs are adopted as weak verbs; and when verbs are made from nouns (for example "to scroll" or "to water") the resulting verb is weak. Additionally, conjugation of weak verbs is easier to teach, since there are fewer classes of variation. In combination, these factors have drastically increased the number of weak verbs, so that in modern English weak verbs are the most numerous and productive form (although occasionally a weak verb may turn into a strong verb through the process of analogy, such as "sneak" (originally only a noun), where "snuck" is an analogical formation rather than survivals from Old English).
There are three major classes of weak verbs in Old English. The first class displays i-mutation in the root, and the second class none. There is also a third class explained below.
Class-one verbs with short roots exhibit gemination of the final stem consonant in certain forms. With verbs in
this appears as or , where <i> and are pronounced [j] . Geminated appears as , and that of appears as . Class one verbs may receive an epenthetic vowel before endings beginning in a consonant.
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