Strong Verbs

Table 11

There were about three hundred strong verbs in OE. They were native words descending from PG with parallels in other OG lan­guages; many of them had a high frequency of occurrence and were basic items of the vocabulary widely used in word derivation and word com­pounding.

The strong verbs in OE (as well as in other OG languages) are usually divided into seven classes.

Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange.

As seen from the table ↓the principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Par­ticiple II. Two of these markers – the zero-ending in the second stem and -en in Participle II – are found only in strong verbs and should be noted as their specific characteristics. The classes differ in the series of root-vowels used to distinguish the four stems. However, only several classes and subclasses make a distinction between four vowels as markers of the four stems – see Class 2, 3b and c, 4 and 5b; some classes distin­guish only three grades of ablaut and consequently have the same root vowel in two stems out of four (Class 1, 3a, 5a); two classes, 6 and 7, use only two vowels in their gradation series.

In addition to vowel gradation some verbs with the root ending in -s, -p or - f employed an interchange of consonants: [s~z~r]; [θ~ð~d] and [f~v]. These interchanges were either instances of po­sitional variation of fricative consonants in OE or relics of earlier po­sitional sound changes; they were of no significance as grammatical markers and disappeared due to levelling by analogy towards the end of OE.

The classes of strong verbs – like the morphological classes of nouns – differed in the number of verbs and, consequently, in their role and weight in the language.

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