An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press


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snı¯

an, where the only later alternation is that /
e
/ has shifted to /d/, and
the paradigm of c
.
e¯osan (II), where /z/ becomes /r/:
c
.
e¯osan
c
.
e¯as
curon
coren
The alternation between and occurs in verbs such as drı¯fan, but it
is obscured by the fact that the Old English spelling system does not
use the symbol . The examples showing the alternation between /x/
and /
γ
/ are shown, with /
γ
/ represented by  or with a sound change
of /
γ
/ to /w/, , but the examples involve contracted verbs, as you
may have been able to deduce, so that we find, for example:
se¯on
seah
sa¯won
sewen
With the passage of time, almost all instances of Verner’s Law have
been lost from English, with the exception of the alternation was ~ were
and occasional idiomatic expressions lost and lorn, where the first of the
pair shows loss of Verner’s Law, the second retention. Even in the Old
English period there are clear signs that the alternation was on its way
out. This is, for example, the case with the class I verb rı¯san ‘rise’ which
always has the paradigm:
rı¯san
ra¯s
rison
risen
Grammar books quite often give lists of verbs where Verner’s Law has
been lost. These lists are usually quite short, but there are two reasons
why this happens. Firstly, in the very frequent case of verbs with medial
f, as we have seen, it is simply orthographically impossible to obtain
evidence one way or the other. Secondly, as everywhere else in Old
STRONG VERBS
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02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 63


English, we can only work with the evidence we have. That is to say, if
no text shows loss of Verner’s Law in respect of a particular verb, all that
this tells us is that there is no extant example of the loss, not that the loss
never occurred. This is quite a subtle point, but the distinction is an
important one, which should always be borne in mind when dealing with
historical languages.
5.5 Modal verbs
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, the present-day English
category of modals sits only uncomfortably into Old English. This is
perhaps particularly true in terms of morphology. Historically speaking,
the verbs which we call ‘modals’ almost all belonged to a group which is
called preterite-present verbs. Such verbs originally had a preterite or
past tense morphology but this morphology had acquired a present tense
meaning. If we take a typical such verb, cunnan ‘can, know’, then it is
possible to observe that it has many of the features which would be
normally associated with a class III verb such as singan. In particular it
can be observed that forms such as cann ‘I know’ and cunnon ‘we know’
relate in form to the past tense forms sang and sungon respectively. Even
in present-day English we find he can and this lacks the final inflectional
-s which we expect to find with every 3rd person singular verb; the lack
of final -s is something that today we still associate only with strong verb
past tense forms, as in sang ‘he sang’.
Because these preterite-present verbs had forms which were preterite
in form but present in meaning, they had to find new past tense forms
from somewhere. The solution to this was to form a new past tense using
the dental suffix associated with the weak verbs, although in a somewhat
altered, and not always well understood, formation.
One obvious result of all this is that the preterite-present forms look
rather irregular, both in their (new) present and past tense morphologies,
and cannot easily be classified in a homogenous fashion. The other
difficulty they present us with is the confusion which arises between
morphological form and morphological content. Another way of putting
this would be to describe this as the confusion between preterite-
presents and modals, for the point is that not every preterite-present
has modal features, and equally not every modal was a preterite-present
verb. Add to this the fact that the modal category is not particularly
robust in Old English, with some verbs showing modal syntactic features
and others showing only semantic indications, and it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that the situation is a mess. It has to be said, however,
that much of the mess is of our own devising, and reflects the results of
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AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH
02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 64


attempting to use a nomenclature which can be shared between Old and
present-day English. There is a judgement to be made about whether or
not this is wise, and although the nomenclature does seem preferable,
nevertheless a ‘health warning’ needs to be issued.
The above having been said, we can list the following modal verbs:

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