19. Oe Verbal s-m

Finite had the following categories: Tense – Present, Past;Mood–Indicative, Imperative, Superlative; Person – 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd; Number –Sg and Pl;Conjugation – strong and weak. Non-finite: Infinitive resembled the Noun and had the category of: Case –Nom and Dat; Participles 1, 2 resembled the Verb, the Noun and the Adjective and had the following categories: Tense – Present (Participle 1) and Past (Participle 2); Number –Sg and l Pl; Gender –M, F, N; Case –Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc; Voice – Active (Part. 1, 2) and Passive (Part 2). There were 12 of Preterite-Present Verbs and most of them later turned into Modal Verbs. Anomalous Verbs were irregular verbs that combined the features of the weak and strong verbs. There were 4 of them – willan (will), bēon (to be), ζān (to go), dōn (to do).

20. Weak verb.

Built their Past 1 and P2 by adding a dental suffix to the present tense form: (inf. )-macian – (Past sg) macode – (P2)-macod – (Past pl)-macodon. They were productive, i.e. all borrowed verbs used weak model of form-building (suffix -t/-d). Many originally strong verbs turned into weak. The opposite process of turning of weak verbs into strong was very rare and was mainly based on phonetic similarity between some strong and weak verbs, i.e. was a result of mere confusion that later was accepted as a norm due to its persistent and regular character (e.g. to wear was originally weak and became strong because of the mistaken analogy with to swear). Several groups of modern E irr. Verbs have developed from the weak verbs of Cl 1 (verbs like sellan and tæcan had an interchange in the root caused by palatal mutation in the Pr. tense stem and its absence in the other stems (Past t – salde, tāhte). ME – sellen – solde, techen – taught; NE – sell – sold, teach – taught. Another group of weak verbs became irregular in Early ME as a result of quantitative vowel changes. In verbs like OE cēpan, fēdan the long vowel in the root was shortened before 2 cons in the Past & Part II: OE cēpte – ME kepte. After the GVSh [i:~e] NE – keep-kept, feed-fed. 900. Inf, Past ,P 2. 3 classes. ger

21. Strong V-s.

Formed their past tense by changing their rout vowel. Writan (inf) – wrot (past sg) – writon (p pl) – written( P 2). The strong verbs were subdivided into 7 classes according to the type of vowel gradation/ablaut. The peculiarity of 6, 7 classes-the same rout vowel in sg and pl. The 4 principal forms had the same endings: an, - , on, en. In ME the inflections -an, -on, -en were all reduced to just one inflection  -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)) the category of Number disappeared in the Verb. 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. 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.

300. I-E. Inf, P sg-pl, P2