An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

participle ends in -l- followed directly by the regular suffixal consonant
-d. In the case of all the verbs in this second group the sequence we find
is always -ht. This group, although also small in number, includes a
significant number of easily recognised words, such as byc
.
g
.
an ~ bohte
‘buy’,
†
ync
.
an ~ 
†
o¯hte ‘think’, se¯can ~ so¯hte ‘seek’, together with several
other word which have either become once more regular or have been
lost: læc
.
c
.
an ‘catch’, strec
.
c
.
an ‘stretch’,
†
ec
.
c
.
an ‘cover, thatch’, 
†
ync
.
an ‘seem’,
wec
.
c
.
an ‘wake’, wyrc
.
an ‘work’ and a few others. Occasionally we find
remnants of the Old English system in the present-day language, for
example wrought from wyrc
.
an.
This conjugation is of interest, of course, because it remains salient,
albeit small, in the present-day language. It is even the case that since
the Old English period one important verb, borrowed from French and
therefore, as a loan word, originally entirely regular, has in time gone
over to this declension. This is the word catch, compare French chasser
‘chase’.
4.5 A phonological interlude
In Chapter 3 I discussed the mutation declension, as in man ~ men, and
now I have discussed ‘unmutated’ weak verbs. You may have guessed that
the two classes have something in common. Indeed, you may have noted
that they share an alternation on the one hand between (crudely speak-
ing) singular and plural and on the other hand between present and past,
in which the crucial feature is that the stem vowel changes. The change
works rather differently in the two paradigms, but nevertheless the
principles are the same, and since there are clear instances of the con-
sequences for both in the present-day language, it is worth spending a
little time on the issue.
The change reflects a sound change which occurred at an early time
in the Old English period thus prior to the appearance of any of our
major texts; it is also found in other Germanic languages such as
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German. The sound change is known either as i-umlaut or i-mutation
the two terms being interchangeable. For those of you who know
German it will be familiar to you from words such as Mann ~ Männer (in
German the double dots over the a in Männer is known as an Umlaut).
I-mutation was caused when there was either an /i/ or a /j/ in the final
syllable of a word, for this /i/ (or /j/, but I shall not separately mention
again /j/ for the sake of brevity) influenced the vowel in the immediately
preceding syllable, with the effect that the vowel was fronted if
originally back or raised if it was already fronted. The effects can be
displayed in a simple diagram:
In the case of the back vowels the change affected both long and short
vowels, whereas only short front vowels were affected. Additionally,
in the case of the low and short back vowel /
ɑ
/ it usually has a further
raising to /e/.
Some time after i-mutation occurred the /i/ which caused the change
was either lost or changed into /e/, so that we can see the following
progression, exemplified in the plural of go¯s ‘goose’:
go¯si- > ge¯si- > ge¯s
Other examples from the mutation declension, showing the change
with a range of vowels, include: mu¯sı¯ > my¯s ‘mice’, hnuti > hnyte ‘nuts’,
burig
. > byrg. ‘castles’, manni > mænn > menn ‘people’, a¯ci > æ¯c. ‘oaks’. Note
how the front vowel corresponding to /u/ is /y/, never /i/. In fact the
majority of instances of stressed y¯ in Old English are due in one way or
another to the influence of i-mutation. There are some other elements
in a full description of i-mutation, most notably that existing diphthongs
are equally affected by the change. I shall return to that point at a later
stage.
Although the above will help you to understand the mutation
declension of nouns, none of the above quite explains the unmutated
conjugation of weak verbs. The best place to start here is with the regular
class 1 conjugation. Recall the typical example trymman. Given what I
VERB FORMS
47
i
e
æ
y
u
o
ɑ
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said in the last sentence of the previous paragraph, you should be able to
tell that the vowel of the stem vowel is the result of i-mutation. This is
true of every regular class 1 verb, including both the types de¯man and
nerian. In most cases the /i/ which causes the mutation is lost, but that is
not so in the case of nerian. And in the past the /i/ remained but then
changed to /e/, hence trymede. In class 2 verbs, however, there is never
any i-mutation, and the i which appears in, say, lufian was not present
before i-mutation occurred.
In unmutated verbs the present tense is exactly like any other class 1
verb. Thus sellan comes from earlier salljan (via sællan), just as trymman
comes from trummjan. But in the past tense the /i/ which causes
mutation was lost before the change took place (or perhaps was never
there in the first place). It is in that sense that these verbs are called
unmutated verbs; the German term Rückumlaut implies that these verbs
never had an i between the stem and the inflexion.
I-mutation is a process which is virtually all-pervasive in Old English,
and we shall see further examples of its importance at later points in this
work. It is, therefore, important that you have some understanding of its
role in Old English. But, as I have shown, it also remains an influence on
our language even today.
4.6 More weak verbs
There are four further weak verbs which historically belong to a third
conjugation, which at one stage contained many more words. These are
habban ‘have’, libban ‘love’, sec
.
g
.
an ‘say’ and hyc
.
g
.
an ‘think’. In Old English
the class 3 verbs look rather like a mixture of class 1 and class 2, having
class 1 features such as gemination and i-mutation (but not throughout
in the latter case) alongside several class 2 inflections.
The result of this, when combined with the fact that all four verbs, and
most of all habban, are of very high frequency and set against the isolated
character of the conjugation, means, almost inevitably, that there is a
great deal of variation in form. I present below a paradigm for habban, but
only in the context of that last point:
Present
Past
Indicative
1 Sing.
hæbbe
hæfde
2 Sing.
hæfst
hæfdest
3 Sing.
hæf
e
hæfde
Plural
habba
e
hæfdon
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Subjunctive
Sing.
hæbbe
hæfde
Plural
hæbben
hæfden
Imperative
2 Sing.
hafa
_____
2 Plural
habba
e
_____