An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

hlihhan ‘laugh’ VI. The temptation is to see these ‘weak presents’ as fore-
runners of the later gradual shift of many strong verbs to the weak
system, but that temptation should be resisted. Note, for example, that
although laugh is indeed weak today, sit is strong.
There are some other verbs which also have paradigms which are
irregular from a morphological point of view. Amongst these are the
following. Firstly there are some class II verbs which have an unexpected
-u¯- in their present tense, e.g. bru¯can ‘enjoy’. It is probable that the source
of this is analogical. That is to say, the present tense has no phonological
explanation, but rather it would appear that the small group of verbs
involved adopted new stem vowels on the analogy of class I. There the
past plural stem vowel drifon appears to be a short version of the ı¯ in the
infinitive drı¯fan: this sets up a proportion ı¯ : i. Applying that to class II we
get the following statement: ı¯ : i :: X : u, and X is satisfied only by u¯.
Analogy is a concept which is often used almost wantonly in historical
studies, but this example is one that shows that it can be used legit-
imately if the criteria for its application are sufficiently tightly drawn.
Finally on this group of verbs, it can be noted that the same, or virtually
the same, verbs in other Germanic languages show the same phenom-
enon; compare German brauchen or Dutch gebruiken, where the respective
diphthongs -au- and -ui- represent the development of original -u
¯
-.
STRONG VERBS
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In class III there are few verbs like berstan ‘burst’ and breg
.
dan ‘pull’
which must be mentioned, if only because some textbooks characterise
this type as demonstrating the basic paradigm for the class. But if you
refer back to the discussion of Ablaut it will be clear from what is said
there that these verbs do not properly belong to class III. In fact they
were originally class V verbs which at some stage acquired an additional
element which disrupted their paradigm and hence they shifted to a
more appropriate ablaut series.
Before I conclude the discussion of strong verbs by looking at two
further phonological issues, we should note one other morphological
feature. This is that there are a very few verbs which have a reduced
ablaut vowel in their present tense, and one of these verbs, namely cuman
‘come’, is of very high frequency. Such verbs are, for reasons we need not
explore here, often called ‘aorist presents’.
Turning to phonological issues, let me first discuss an issue which is
not solely associated with strong verbs, but nevertheless is well rep-
resented there and can cause problems. This is the issue of contracted
verbs. If you look back at the ablaut series, what you should be able to
see is that in every class except classes III and IV it is possible for
the stem of the verb to end in a voiceless velar fricative, i.e. /x/. In the
development of this sound, which is usually spelled as in (uncon-
troversially) a word such as he¯ah ‘high’ (see §1.7), this sound was weak-
ened between vowels to the glottal fricative /h/ and then disappeared
altogether.
In the cases that concern us the loss of /h/ means that there is no
longer any consonant between the stem vowel and the inflection. Thus,
if we take as an example the class V verb se¯on ‘see’, this would at one stage
have been sı¯han. The loss of /h/ causes the stem vowel and the vowel
of the inflection to merge together as a diphthong. If you know any
German, then you might like to compare the present-day German form
sehen. From our point of view, although these contracted verbs, as they
are usually called, are somewhat awkward in much of their detail – with
the result in Old English that some of them change their class member-
ship quite readily – all we need note is that they are rather distinctive in
that their infinitive form always ends -e¯on, unlike any other verb except
be¯on, which has a similar source.
The second phonological issue is more complicated still, but is un-
avoidable. To see the problem, compare the paradigms of two class I
verbs, rı¯dan ‘ride’ and snı¯
†
an ‘cut’:
rı¯dan
ra¯d
ridon
-riden
snı¯
t
an
sna¯
t
snidon
-sniden
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As can be seen, snı¯
†
an has an unexpected change in consonant in the past
plural and past participle. This is a result of a Germanic sound change
known as Verner’s Law, after the nineteenth-century Danish linguist
Karl Verner. What Verner discovered was that wherever a voiceless frica-
tive occurred between voiced sounds, then that fricative became voiced
provided that it was not preceded by the accent. After Verner’s Law
had operated, the stress patterns of the Germanic languages changed
so, broadly speaking, stress always applied on the initial syllable. But
previously the first syllables of past plural and past participles had been
unstressed. Hence the alternations seen above.
Verner’s Law predicts the following changes:
f
→
v;
θ
→
e
; x 
→

; s 
→
z
However, mostly because of later sound changes, but also because of the
Old English spelling system, the results of Verner’s Law are frequently
obscured. The easiest examples to follow are as in the paradigm of