As you may or may not know, I have a deep interest in linguistics. As such, I have done a lot of research on my own time (and have yet to take a class, as I am not yet in college where I can take a linguistics class). I find this absolutely fascinating. And language is important to everybody, I figure most people will find linguistic facts at least peripherally interesting. For that reason, I thought I would share another one of my linguistic research projects with you (the other being the English phonetic spelling). I actually wrote a somewhat long paper on this topic for my German class, but since both English and German share this phenomenon (strong verbs), it is applicable to English speakers as well. Hopefully you will find this interesting, even if you don't understand parts of it (I tried to keep things fairly simple). So, here it goes:
Native speakers of English perhaps aren't vexed by this, but I am sure foreign learners are. I speak of irregular verbs. We learn them when we are young as irregular, that is, without rules, but there were in fact rules for their formation but the forces of language change over time have obscured those rules. Every irregular verb has an explanation behind it. However, these are often isolated. There is however a set of irregular verbs that is more regular than you think. These are the strong verbs. How can you tell if an irregular verb is strong? If it changes the vowel in the past tense and past participle (for example, "sing sang sung"). If it adds a t or d at all, even if there is a vowel change (like "think thought" or "keep kept"), or changes form entirely (like "go went" or "be was"), then it is either irregular weak or anamalous respectively.
The strong verb system is the most ancient of them all, dating back at least 5 or 6 thousand years if not more. And the Germanic languages (English, German, Scandinavian Languages, Dutch, etc.) preserve this system the best of all of the Indo-European languages (which includes most of the languages of Europe except Basque, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish, and also includes languages in the Muslim world and India such as Farsi, Pashto and Hindi; Latin and Greek were also Indo-European languages). The system is the native Indo-European method for forming basic verb tenses.
In the ancient system, there weren't actually tenses, but instead aspects, which indicate not time but type of action and whether or not it was completed. There were three aspects in Indo-European: present or durative (which indicated a lasting action generally in the present), aorist (which indicated an action generally in the past with no reference to completion) and the perfect (which indicated completed action). Present and perfect survived to form the present and past tense of English verbs. Remember that additional tenses are formed with auxillary or helping verbs such as "have", "do" and "be" with the infinitive, present participle or past participle.
Instead of using a suffix or an auxillary to indicate these different aspects, Indo-European utilised something called "ablaut" (a German term referring originally just to the vowel change in strong verbs). Ablaut is the process of vowel change in a word caused by a move in the stress. In Indo-European, stress moved about depending on the desired meaning. While the rules for this have not been reconstructed since they are so ancient, the residue remains. What happened was a fully stressed vowel was an 'e', a secondarily-stressed vowel was an 'o' and a weakly stressed or non-stressed vowel simply disappeared. There was no 'a' in Indo-European (this sound came about later from a number of sources, none of which I will go into here). If you don't believe that this works, try out ablaut for yourself. Take the sentence "can he do it?", and try stressing it in three different places: the first time on the "can", the second time on the "he" and the third time on the "do". Note what happens to the vowel in "can". The first time, it is a full vowel, the second time, it is reduced somewhat and the third time it is practically non-existent. Also note that by changing the stress, the sentence takes on a different meaning. Such a change in meaning with stress like in English may have been behind the changing stress in Indo-European which produced such a system.
How does this connect to strong verbs? Looking at English strong verbs, there is absolutely no way to tell that this was the cause. This is because in Germanic, stress moved to the first syllable of a word no matter what (but not onto prefixes, being as they were not technically part of the word). Thus, the original stress patterns were lost. However, other languages do show the original stress pattern, and from these, it can be reconstructed the process that formed strong verbs. I won't go much into that, instead I will simply state where each of the three vowel grades (the 'e'-grade, 'o'-grade and zero-grade as explained above) occur.
The present uses the 'e'-grade because the present was originally stressed on the root vowel. So, in the case of "sing", the original form was "*senghw-" (the star means that the form was reconstructed but not actually attested). In the past, we run into a problem. Modern English has only one vowel for the past, in the case of "sing" this is "sang". Historically, though, there were actually two forms, one for the singular and one for the plural. The two forms in Old English were "sang" and "sungon". The two forms in Indo-European were "*sesonghwa" and "*(se)snghwme" (it looks unpronounceable, but the 'n' is actually its own syllable, much like the "en" in "eaten"). In the first form, the stress was on the "se" (the so-called reduplicated syllable), with the main vowel having partial/secondary stress, so it became an 'o'. In the second form, the stress fell on the ending "-me" (which means "we"), and left the main vowel in a weakly stressed position, which means that it disappeared. Why the stress fell where it did isn't know for sure, but the fact that it fell in different places is important because that determined the vowel. Note: In Germanic, the syllabic 'n' became "un", producing "sung-".
English has since eliminated most endings, such as "me" and "a", as well as all traces of reduplication (the process of doubling the initial consonant and vowel of a word - for example "*senghw-" -> "*sesongwha"). Modern English has also gotten rid of the distinction between singular and plural in the past tense of all verbs, with one or the other taking over. In the case of "sing", the singular form took over. In other verbs, such as "bite", the plural form took over ("bit" instead of "*bote").
There were six classes of strong verbs in Germanic, and a seventh class that became strong in most Germanic languages. In English, only one of the classes has died out. But sound changes have split the classes into subgroups and created a host of semi-irregular forms that make the whole strong verb system essentially irregular. However, there are still patterns, some that people notice, like when they say "bring brang brung" on analogy with "sing sang sung" or "think thank thunk" from "sink sank sunk". These are all examples of class III strong verbs. Other members include "swim" and "ring". Class I strong verbs include "write wrote written", "bite bit bitten", "ride rode ridden". Class II strong verbs include "freeze froze frozen", "break broke broken" (originally class IV) and "choose chose chosen". Class V strong verbs include "eat ate eaten", "give gave given" (originally class III). Class VI strong verbs include "take took taken", "shake shook shaken". Class VII strong verbs include "blow blew blown", "know knew known". The actual
One thing to note is that most strong verbs are very common. They are not common because they are strong but rather strong because they are common. Words in common use resist regularization. So "man men", a very common word, has not changed over to a more regular "man *mans". But words that are used more infrequently, or are newer (this includes nearly every borrowed word, of which there are a lot in English), follow the rules. And words which used to be irregular, but were not in frequent usage, became regular. "Carve" used to be a class III strong verb, but it is now weak: "carve carved carved". And the most often used verb "be" is the most irregular as it has hung on to all sorts of forms throughout its history. In fact, it is formed from three different verb stems.
Irregular verbs
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