An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

Present
Past
Indicative
1 Sing.
de¯me
de¯mde
2 Sing.
de¯mst
de¯mdest
3 Sing.
de¯m
e
de¯mde
Plural
de¯ma
e
de¯mdon
Subjunctive
Sing.
de¯me
de¯mde
Plural
de¯men
de¯mdon
VERB FORMS
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Imperative
2nd Sing.
de¯m
_____
2nd Plural
de¯ma
e
_____
Participle
de¯mende
g
.
ede¯med
Given the discussion immediately above, the first thing to note is that
here there is no sign of gemination. The reason for that is that gemin-
ation could only occur after a light syllable. This mention of syllable
weight leads us on naturally to the next point. Forms such as de¯mst, de¯m
´
,
de¯mde do not have any vowel immediately after the stem, in contrast to
all the other forms we have encountered. This is the result of a process
called syncope. Broadly speaking, what happens is that a fully un-
stressed vowel is lost after a heavy syllable provided that it is followed by
further syllabic material. Of course, this does not immediately appear
to be the case in de¯mst and de¯m
´
; compare g
.
ede¯med where there is no
syncope. All that I can say here, rather unsatisfactorily, is that at the time
when the change occurred, there was indeed a further following vowel.
Despite this, the actual process of syncope is not too difficult to under-
stand, especially because it can happen in later periods of English too.
That explains, for example, the pronunciation of business, where there
are only two syllables, compare busyness ‘the state of being busy’, where
there is no syncope.
There is a slight glitch in the conjugation of class 1 verbs which I have
yet to mention. This occurs in conjugation of verbs with a light stem
ending in -r. Since the glitch is apparent only in the present tense, we
need only examine those forms. An example of such a verb is nerian
‘save’:
Present
Indicative
Subjunctive
1 Sing.
nerie
2 Sing.
nerest
3 Sing.
nere
e
Sing.
nerie
Plural
neria
e
Plural
nerien
Imperative
2nd Sing.
nere
2nd Plural
neria
e
Participle
neriende
Why do these forms differ from the usual short-stemmed verbs, and how
do they do so? The answer to the second of these questions helps to
answer the first. For it should be clear that the distinguishing feature of
these verbs is that they show medial -i- in exactly where they should
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have a geminate consonant. Although there is no completely adequate
explanation of why /r/ should prevent gemination, it is undoubtedly the
case that it does so.
There is an interesting consequence of this failure. As you can see,
verbs like nerian fall halfway between class 1 and class 2 verbs, in not
having gemination but rather preserving -i-; on the other hand they
otherwise have the typical class 1 inflexions, e.g. nere
´
rather than those
of class 2, compare lufa
´
. Old English speakers appear to have noticed
that state of affairs too and consequently in later texts, such as those from
the period of Ælfric, words such as nerian began to adopt the inflections
of the class 2 conjugation so that we find nera
´
as well as nere
´
. This is an
early sign of what was to come, when in the Middle English period
simplification to one weak verb class occurred.
4.4 Unmutated verbs
There was in Old English a small but important group of verbs which
were in origin part of class 1 but which had already undergone drastic
modification. Historical grammars always classify these verbs as belong-
ing to a sub-group of class 1, but there is good reason for not doing so. I
shall call these verbs ‘unmutated verbs’, an ugly terms derived from the
German term Rückumlaut ‘reverse umlaut’. I shall explain more about this
phenomenon, which involves the sound change called i-umlaut which I
referred to when discussing nouns like fo¯t ‘foot’ in the previous chapter,
in §4.5. A typical unmutated verb is sellan ‘sell’. In the present tense such
a verb is exactly like any other class 1 verb, but its past tense is very
different:
Present
Past
Indicative
1 Sing.
selle
sealde
2 Sing.
selest
sealdest
3 Sing.
sele
e
sealde
Plural
sella
e
sealdon
Subjunctive
Sing.
selle
sealde
Plural
sellen
sealdon
Imperative
2nd Sing.
sele
_____
2nd Plural
sella
e
Participle
sellende
g
.
eseald
VERB FORMS
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As you can see, the stem vowel of the past is unexpected given what
we have seen so far. But it is also true that we find the same kind of alter-
nation in present-day English sell ~ sold. That is why I have chosen to
assign such verbs to a class of their own. Today there is only one verb
which follows the same pattern, namely tell = Old English tellan, but
there were others in Old English: cwellan ‘kill’, dwellan ‘dwell’, stellan
‘place’.
There is, however, another group of verbs which belong to the same
conjugation, such as bringan ~ bro¯hte ‘bring’. You may have noted that
all the verbs in the previous paragraph have a stem which in the past