Weak Verbs

Old English Grammar 1

Chapter 8 · Weak Verbs

⚙️ Weak Verbs

Old English verbs split into two groups: strong verbs, which change their stem vowel to make the past (Chapter 9), and weak verbs, which add an ending. Weak verbs are the larger group, and Modern English regular verbs (walk, walked) descend from them. All forms below are from the Verbs section of Wikipedia's Old English grammar article; I give its tables as printed.

What a verb form tells you

• Tense: present or past. There is no separate future; the present does that job (my note from the two-tense statement, not a claim in the article's text).
• Mood: indicative (statements), subjunctive and imperative (commands).
• Person and number: first, second and third person singular; one plural form for all three persons.
• Non-finite forms: the infinitive, the present participle ending -ende, and the past participle (ġe)-ed, (ġe)-od, (ġe)-d or (ġe)-en depending on the verb.
• No synthetic passive: "was loved" is built with helper verbs plus the participle, not a special ending.

Class II: the simplest — lufian "to love"

Nearly all Class II verbs end in -ian (hopian "to hope", wincian "to wink"). They do not cause i-umlaut, so the stem matches the source word: lufu "love" gives lufian "to love". Almost all share the same endings, which makes this the pattern to learn first.

Class I: the biggest — dǣlan "to share"

Class I verbs are often made from nouns or adjectives and usually show i-umlaut in the root vowel. The article's examples: dēman "to judge" from dōm "judgment", blǣċan "to bleach" from blāc "pale", tellan "to count" from tæl "number", rȳman "to make room" from rūm "room". They are not conjugated uniformly: endings depend on the stem vowel's length, the final consonants and sometimes the word's history.

Two other Class I patterns from the article, compared with dǣlan:

* The article's table prints the infinitive of temman as teman, while naming the verb temman; it does not explain the difference. The article says temman has "the same endings" as dǣlan and the same alternation between single and double consonants. It gives no rule for predicting which Class I pattern a verb takes, and it does not discuss nerian or hīeran, so they are not covered here.

Class III: four verbs

The class was once much larger, but only four verbs remained in the written texts, each irregular: habban "to have", libban "to live", seċġan "to say" and hyċġan "to think".

The article does not comment on the odd stems in this table (leofast, leofaþ, leofa beside libbe; hogde beside hyċġan). My own comparison: hæfde is recognisably the ancestor of Modern English "had", and sæġde of "said".

The dental ending

The article says the weak past uses a -d- ending, sometimes -t-, but it does not state rules for choosing among -ede, -ode, -de and -te, and -te does not appear in the section I read. What its tables show is a pattern by class:

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