Lacture10. Weak verbs

Lacture10. Weak verbs.

• Plan;
• 1.Towards the etymology of the dental suffix or weak verbs.
• 2.Classes of weak verb.
• 3.Weak verbs, as a Germanic innovation.
• 4.Preterite-Present verbs.
• 5.The evolution of the Old Germanic verb in modern Germanic languages.

In the Germanic languages weak verbs are by far the langest group of verbs, are therefore often regarded as the norm [regular verbs].They are distinguished from the Germanic strong verb by fact that their past tense form is marked by an infection containing a/t/,/d/ sound rather than by changing the verb’s root vowel[as English/rise/rose]

The weak verbs have become the normal form of verbs in Germanic with most strong verbs being reassigned the weak clas

For example, in Old English the verb to lock [lucan] was strong verb [present tense ic leac ‘l locked’], but has now become weak.This transition ongoing.

While there were 4 classes of weak verbs in Gothic, in OE there were 3. Every weak verb is characterized by 3 forms; infinitive, past tense and participle II The Past Plural can be derived from the past Singular by replacing the e ending of the singular by the on ending of the plural. The stem of the Participle II is always identical with that of Past tense

In Germanic languages, weak verbs are those verbs that form their preterits and past participles by means of a dental suffix, an inflection that contains a/t/ or /d/ sound or similar.[For comparative purposes, they will be referred to as a dental, but in some of the languages, including most varieties of English, /t/ and /d/ are alveolar instead.]

WEAK VERBS In late ME the vowel [e] in unstressed medial and final syllables became very unstable and was lost This change eliminated the differences between the two classes and also the distinctions between 2nd and 3rd principal forms, thus reducing the number of stems in the weak verbs from three to two. The marker of the pasr tense and participle II employed by the weak verbs proved to be very productive in all historical periodsthe dental suffix –d/t

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