Strong Verbs and their Development

1. As far as the strong verbs were a non-productive class, some strong verbs turned into weak with time, i.e. started to employ -t/-d suffix in their form-building (e.g. to climb, to help, to swallow, to wash, etc.). Thus in NE only 70 strong verbs out of 300 in OE remained.

2. The strong verbs were subdivided into 7 classes according to the type of vowel gradation/ablaut.

The classes that survived best through different periods of the history were classes 1, 3, 6:

Class 1	Infinitive	Past Sg	Past Pl	Participle 2
OE	wrītan	wrāt	writon	writen
ME	writen	wrot	writen	writen
NE	write	wrote	written

Class 3	Infinitive	Past Sg	Past Pl	Participle 2
OE	findan	fand	fundon	funden
ME	finden	fand	founden	founden
NE	find	found	found

Class 6	Infinitive	Past Sg	Past Pl	Participle 2
OE	scacan	scoc	scōcon	scacen
ME	shaken	shook	shoken	shaken
NE	shake	shook	shaken

Analysing the tables above, we can see that the following changes occurred:

· In ME the inflections - an, -on, -en were all reduced to just one inflection à - en.

· In NE the ending -n was lost in the Infinitive and preserved in the Participle 2 in order to distinguish these two forms.

· In NE Past Singular and Past Plural forms were unified, usually with the Singular form preferred as a unified form because Past Plural and Participle 2 often had similar forms and it was hard to distinguish them (e.g. ME writen (Past Pl) – writen (Part. 2))à the category of Number disappeared in the Verb.

In ModE the subdivision into classes was lost though we still can trace some peculiarities of this or that class in the forms of the irregular verbs.

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