Lecture Old English phonetics. The verb as a

Lecture 5. Old English phonetics .The verb as a parts of speech in OE.

1. 
   Strong verbs.
   
2. 
   Weak verbs.
   
3. 
   The types of the vers in OE and its grammatical categories
   

Verbs in Old English are divided into strong and weak verbs. Strong verbs form the past tense by changing a vowel, while weak verbs add an ending.
What is the difference between strong and weak verbs? What are strong verbs examples?
How many strong verbs are there in English? What is the definition of a strong verb?
The State of Being Verbs
... The most common state of being verb is to be, along with its conjugations (is, am, are, was, were, being, been). As we can see, is is a conjugation of the verb be. It takes the third person singular present form.

The distinction between a weak verb and a strong verb is based on how the past tense of the verb is formed. Weak verbs (more commonly called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form—or present tense—of the verb, such as call, called and walk, walked.

Strong verbs (usually called irregular verbs) form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form, such as to give, gave and stick, stuck.

Strong vs. Weak

In "Garner's Modern American Usage," author Bryan Garner explains the difference between a week and strong verbs:
"Irregular verbs are sometimes called "strong" verbs because they seem to form the past tense from their own resources, without calling a The term "strong" has been inherited from Old English grammar, and many of today's irregular forms are descendants of common Old English verbs. Although fewer than 200 modern English verbs are strong, these irregulars—most of which are just one syllable in length—are among the most common in the language.
Examples of Weak Verbs

With week verbs, the stem vowel does not change in the past or past participle tense. Take the word walk, for example. The past and past participle of this verb would be walked because the stem vowel does not change. Another example would be work, where the verb

becomes worked in the past and past participle. Other examples of the week, or regular, verbs would be as follows, where the verb is listed on the left with the past/past participle on the right:

• 
  Add > added
  
• 
  Beg > begged
  
• 
  Call > called
  
• 
  Damage > damaged
  
• 
  Earn > earned
  
• 
  Mark > marked
  
• 
  Taste > tasted
  
• 
  Yell > yelled
  

The past tense or past participle of these verbs looks roughly the same as the present tense because, as noted, the stem vowel does not change.

Strong Verbs Examples

By contrast, strong verbs generally do have a change in the stem vowel in the past or past participle. For example, the past tense and past participle of bringing is brought. At other times, the stem vowel in a strong verb might change in the past tense but not in the past participle, such as arise, which becomes arose in the past tense but arisen in the past participle (as in he has arisen.) Other examples of strong verbs would be:

• 
  Blow > blew (past tense), blown (past participle)
  
• 
  Break > broke (past tense), broken (past participle)
  
• 
  Do > did (past tense), done (past participle)
  
• 
  Feed > fed (past tense and past particle)
  
• 
  Lie (down) > lay (past tense), lain (past participle)
  
• 
  Speak > spoke (past tense), spoken (past participle)
  

As you can see, there is no hard-and-fast rule for determining if a verb is a week or strong. Since there are fewer than 200 strong verbs in English, the best method is to memorize their use in the past and past participle.

Most academics classify all Old English verbs into four types: anomalous or basic, preterite-present, strong, and weak. The lemma form for an Old English verb is the infinitive, which typically ends with -an.

There were only two tenses in Old English, present and preterite. Either can modify into the subjunctive mood. The present tense is used for the future, with context determining which tense is meant. Auxiliary verbs such as willan also started to be used to indicate future during the Old English period.
Verbs conjugate through a mixture of inflectional suffixes and stem-modifications. Plural verb forms do not distinguish between persons.
Anomalous verbs
These verbs show many irregularities, and tend to be old words. They are sometimes called "basic" verbs, because they are fundamental components of the language. Some of them are historically a blend of two or more different Germanic verbs. There are only five: bēon, wesan, dōn, gān and willan.
Preterite-present verbs

• 
  Preterite-present verb
  

Some Germanic verbs underwent a shift whereby their strong preterite-tense forms became reinterpreted as their present-tense forms. New "weak" endings were then used to form the new preterite tense. The present tenses of these verbs therefore resemble the preterite tense forms of strong verbs, below.
Many of the preterite-present verbs are important as modal verbs or auxiliary verbs.

• 
  Germanic strong verb
  

Verbs are known as "strong" which form their preterite tenses by means of a change in the stem-vowel, i.e. by "ablaut". Many of these changes still exist in modern English, reflected in verbs such as sing (past tense sang, past participle sung).
There are seven classes of strong verb in Old English, denoted on Wiktionary with Roman numerals. Each class has a different ablaut-series (though confusingly, there are three types of Class III).