Conjugation of preterite-presents in Old English

Infinitive	cunnan ‘can’	sculan ‘shall, should’
Present tense
Indicative Singular 1st 2nd	cann canst	sceal(l) scealt
3rd	cann	sceal(l)
Plural	cunnon	sculon
Subjunctive Singular Plural	cunne cunnen	scule, scyle sculen, scylen
Participle I	—
Past tense
Indicative
Singular 1st	cūðe	sceolde
2nd	cūðest	sceoldest
3rd	cūðe	sceolde
Plural	cūðon	sceoldon
Subjunctive
Singular	cūðe	sceolde
Plural	cūðen	sceolden
Participle II	cunnen, cūð	—

Among the verbs of the minor groups there were several anomalous verbs with irregular forms.

OE willan was an irregular verb with the meaning of volition and desire; it resembled the preterite-presents in meaning and function, as it indicated an attitude to an action and was often followed by an infinitive. Cf.: 'þā ðe willað mīnes forsīðes fæ¥nian 'those who wish to rejoiceinmy death'.

Willan had a past tense form wolde, built like sceolde, the past tense of the preterite-present sculan, sceal. Eventually willan became a modal verb, like the surviving preterite-presents, and, together with sculan developed into an auxiliary (Mod E shall, will, should, would).

Some verbs combined the features of weak and strong verbs. OE dōn formed a weak Past tense with a vowel interchange and a Participle in -n: dōn – dyde – ¥e-dōn ‘do’. OE būan 'live' had a weak past būde and participle II, ending in -n, ¥e-būn like a strong verb.

Two OE verbs were suppletive: OE ¥ān, whose past tense was built from a different root: ¥ān – eōde – ¥e-¥ān ‘go’, and bēon ‘be’.

Bēon is an ancient (IE) suppletive verb. In many languages – Germanic and non-Germanic – its paradigm is made up of several roots. (Recall Ukr бути, R быть, есть, Fr être, suis, fut). In OE the present tense forms were different modifications of the roots *wes- and *bhū, 1^st p. sg – eom, bēo, 2^nd p. eart, bist, etc. The past tense was built from the root *wes- on the pattern of strong verbs of Class 5. Though the infinitive and participle II do not occur in the texts, the set of forms can be reconstructed as: *wesan – wæs – wǽron – weren.

Table 4.6

Conjugation of beon/wesan and ¥an/eode

The verbals

The verb system in Old English was represented by two sets of forms: the finite forms of the verb and the non-finite forms of the verb, or verbals (the infinitive and the participle). Those two types of forms – the finite and the non-finite – differed more than they do today from the point of view of their respective grammatical categories, as the verbals at that historical period were not conjugated like the verb proper, but were declined like nouns or adjectives.

The infinitive could have two case-forms which may conventionally be called the “common” (nominative) case and the “dative” case.

Common case Dative case

wrītan ‘to write’ tō writenne‘so that I shall write’

cēpan‘to keep’ tō cepenne‘so that I shall keep’

drincan‘to drink’ tō drincenne‘so that I shall drink’

The so-called common case form of the infinitive was widely used in different syntactical functions, the dative case was used on a limited scale and mainly when the infinitive functioned as an adverbial modifier of purpose, i.e. Ic ¥ā tō drincenne‘I go to drink’.

Thus, the infinitive had no verbal grammatical categories. Being a verbal noun by origin, it had a sort of reduced case-system: two forms which roughly corresponded to the Nom. and the Dat. cases of nouns – beran – the uninflected infinitive ("Nom." case); tō berenne or tō beranne – inflected Infinitive ("Dat." case). Like the Dat. case of nouns the inflected infinitive with the prepo­sition tō could be used to indicate the direction or purpose of an action, e.g. Mani¥e cōmen tō byc¥enne þā þin¥ 'many (people) came to buy those things'.

The uninflected infinitive was used in verb phrases with verbs or other verbs of incomplete predication, e. g.: hīe woldon hine forbærnan 'they wanted to burn him’.

The participle was a kind of verbal adjective which was characterised not only by nominal but also by certain verbal features. Participle I present participle) was opposed to participle II (past participle) through voice and tense distinctions: it was active and expressed present or simultaneous processes and qualities, while participle II expressed states and qualities resulting from past action and was contrasted to participle I as passive to active, if the verb was transitive. Participle II of intransitive verbs had an active meaning; it indicated a past action and was opposed to participle I only through tense. The translations of the participles in Table 4.7 explain the meanings of the forms.

Table 4.7

Participles in Old English

As seen from the table the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the present tense stem (the infinitive without the endings -an, -ion) with the help of the suffix -ende. Participle II had a stem of its own – in strong verbs it was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix -en; with weak verbs it ended in -d/-t. Participle II was commonly marked by the prefix ¥e-.

Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were declined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case.

Thus, the OE verb was characterised by many peculiar features. Though the verb had few grammatical categories, its paradigm had a complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form-building means. All the forms of the verb were synthetic, as analytical forms were only beginning to appear. The non-finite forms had little in common with the finite forms and shared many features with the nominal parts of speech.

Conclusions

1. The verbal system in OE included finite and non-finite forms, which differed more than those in Mod E, since verbals were not only conjugated but also declined, like nominal parts of speech.

2. The system of conjugation of the OE verb included the categories of tense, mood, number and person.

2.1. The category of person involved the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd persons; their forms differed only in the singular forms of the indicative mood.

2.2. The category of number was formed by the opposition of the singular and plural forms.

2.3. The category of tense was presented by the present and past forms. The meaning of futurity was expressed by means of the present forms accompanied with an appropriate adverb or a combination of the modal verb with the infinitive.

2.4. The category of mood included the forms of the indicative, imperative and oblique moods, with the latter being used both for expression of real and problematic actions ( which are expressed by two different moods in Mod E), and in place of the indicative mood to render indirect speech.

3. All OE verbs can be subdivided into a number of groups in accordance with the grammatical means used to build their principal stems: root vowel interchange and suffixation.

3.1. Strong verbs used ablaut, or root vowel interchange as the principal means of expressing different grammatical categories. Grammatical endings were added directly to the root (stem) of the verb. Strong verbs are the most ancient verbs of the language. There were 7 classes of strong verbs, which differed in their gradation series depending on the initial phonetic structure of the verb stem.

3.2. Weak verbs are younger than strong verbs. They used suffixation as a principal grammatical means to form their stems. This way of building the principal forms was most productive, and new verbs that entered the language generally built their forms on analogy with the weak verbs. In contrast to strong verbs, weak verbs had a stem-forming suffix that followed the root and preceded the grammatical ending. In accordance with the character of this suffix the weak verbs are subdivided into three classes.