An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

Present
Past
Past Participle
sing
sang
sung
As we look at this verb it becomes immediately apparent that the only
thing that distinguishes one part of this verb from another is the shape of
the vowel, whether it is /

/, /æ/ or /

/, and there is no sign of a distinct
inflectional suffix. Of course we can add one in certain contexts, as in she
sings, but that has no effect on which vowel is used, so that she sang is the
corresponding past tense form and there is no inflectional suffix at all,
since no such suffix is available for this verb in that part of the paradigm.
If, in strong verbs, there are no inflectional suffixes which distinguish
present and past tenses, how is it possible to know when a verb is present
or past? The only possible answer to this question has to be that the past
tense (and the past participle also) are distinguished by the variation in
stem vowel. And this is not a mere idiosyncrasy of the verb sing. There
are other verbs which behave identically, for example ring and swim. But
there are other verbs which have the same basic pattern but where the
pattern is different and this seems to be because the stem vowel is differ-
ent. An example of this would be ride with the past tense form rode.
Thus what we can observe is a patterned variation in stem vowel
which has the function of carrying information about, in particular,
features associated with tense. It is this patterned variation which is
known as Ablaut. Ablaut is a feature which is found throughout the
Germanic languages and is indeed one of the defining features of these
languages. With the lapse of time its presence is not always obvious and
it can, for example, be tempting to suppose that every present-day verb
which shows vowel variation between the present and the past is an
example of a strong verb. But as we have already seen, in Chapter 4, the
examples of the unumlauting verbs such as sell show this to be false.
There are, regrettably, other examples where later changes occur and
muddy the waters further. In Old English, however, the position is
usually much clearer.
5.3 Strong verb classes
I have already shown that in present-day English there are several other
verbs which follow the same pattern as sing. Let’s call this an Ablaut
pattern. Consider now another present-day verb, ride, which I mentioned
two paragraphs ago. This too shows an Ablaut pattern: ride ~ rode ~ ridden
STRONG VERBS
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(ignore for a moment the -en suffix). It will be clear, however, that this
pattern is not the same as that in sing. One way of confirming this is by
noting that the two patterns do not rhyme.
The same situation holds in Old English, and it results from the
fact that the Ablaut patterns derive from a much earlier stage in the
development of the language. This, of course, explains why all the
Germanic languages share Ablaut. There were, in fact, six Ablaut
patterns in Germanic, and a further group of verbs which share this
pattern in complex and obscure ways. It is therefore usual to talk about
seven strong verb classes (the six more or less regular classes plus the
seventh more obscure class). There is no reason to depart from this
description here and I shall henceforth talk about class I, class II, etc.
Note that I use Roman numbers as a mnemonic to distinguish strong
verbs from the weak verbs.
Let us start our examination of strong verbs with a typical class I verb,
rı¯dan ‘ride’. In Old English, as opposed to today, there are always
four possible ablaut variations. These are usually exemplified from the
infinitive, past tense singular, past tense plural and the past participle.
Thus the paradigm of rı¯dan is as follows: