An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

particularly, formal English, as in sentences such as If I were you, I would
do that, where subjunctive were is used in preference to indicative was, a
point I first noted in the previous chapter. In such usage the subjunctive
is signalling that the conditional clause is not true or counterfactual. In
broad terms we can say that in Old English the subjunctive is used not
only in such cases but in a very wide range of cases where there is no
claim that the clause or sentence is true. When we move on to syntax I
shall come back to this quite complex issue.
Two paragraphs ago I implied that Old English presents no problems
in respect of tense. Now it is true that, as today, there were only two sets
of tense inflections, present and past, but this rather hides something. In
present-day English there are special constructions for aspect, namely
be+ing for progressive aspect and have+ed for perfective aspect, as in
I was walking and I have walked respectively. These constructions are
all-pervasive today, but although they existed in Old English they were
not as common as today, and could have meanings different from those
we associate with aspect. Furthermore, the use of will/shall + verb as a
means of expressing the future is only at the stage of inception in Old
English. Thus the Old English expression of tense is much simpler than
that of today, and that should always be borne in mind. Of course, that is
slightly misleading, for although the set of forms available is indeed
simpler than in present-day English, there is a corresponding increase in
the set of meanings which each tense has to cover.
Finally at this stage we should note that there was, with one exception,
no morphological passive voice in Old English. The exception occurs
with the verb ha¯tan ‘call’ which has a passive form both singular (ha¯tte)
and plural (ha¯tton), which is used in both the present and the past.
40
AN INTRODUCTION TO OLD ENGLISH
02 pages 001-166 29/1/03 16:09 Page 40

---

4.2 A weak verb
It is now time to look at the paradigm of a typical Old English verb. Let
us firstly consider a weak verb. The reason for taking a weak rather than
a strong verb first is that although the strong verbs have the older line of
descent and contain a higher proportion of the core vocabulary, the weak
verbs are most productive both in Old English and right up to the
present-day. It also has to be said that they are, for the present-day
reader, rather easier to grasp.
But the first point which has to be faced is that, just as nouns and adjec-
tives have a variety of declensions, so verbs have a parallel variety of