The Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of medieval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish (North); English, Dutch and German (West); and Gothic (East, extinct). The Germanic verb system lends itself to both descriptive (synchronic) and historical (diachronic) comparative analysis. This overview article is intended to lead into a series of specialist articles discussing historical aspects of these verbs, showing how they developed out of PIE, and how they came to have their present diversity.
Verb types The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb system:
Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following English forms: "I did, I have done, I had done, I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing"). Development of a new way of indicating the preterite and past participle, using a dental suffix. Later Germanic languages developed further tenses periphrastically, that is, using auxiliary verbs, but the constituent parts of even the most elaborate periphrastic constructions are still only in either present or preterite tenses (or non-finite forms, compare I would have been doing, an English conditional perfect progressive with would in the preterite, the other three parts being non-finite). Germanic verbs fall into two broad types, strong and weak. Elements of both are present in the preterite-present verbs. Despite various irregularities, most verbs fall into one of these categories. Suppletive verbs are completely irregular, being composed of parts of more than one Indo-European verb. There is one verb (*dōną 'to do') that is in a category of its own, based on an Indo-European "athematic" form, and having a "weak" preterite but a "strong" passive participle.
Strong verbs
Strong (or vocalic) verbs display vowel gradation or ablaut, that is, the past tense is marked by a change in the vowel in the stem syllable. Examples include: Modern English:
fall – fell – fallen sing – sang – sung Old English:
fallan – feoll – feollon – (ge)fallen (to fall) hātan – hēt – hēton – (ge)hāten (to be called) Old High German:
fallan – fiall – fiallun – (gi)fallan (to fall) heizan – hiaz – hiazun – (gi)heizan (to be called) In the older languages, these verbs may also be reduplicating, that is, the past tense forms add a prefix with the same consonant as the first consonant of the stem syllable. An example in Gothic is lētan – laílōt – laílōtum – lētans (to have). In Proto-Germanic, consonant alternations known as grammatischer Wechsel developed, as a result of Verner's law. This involves an originally regular change in the consonant at the end of the stem syllable. An example in modern Dutch is verliezen – verloor – verloren (to lose) These are the direct descendants of the verb in Proto-Indo-European, and are paralleled in other Indo-European languages. Examples include:
leipō – leloipa – elipon (Greek: to leave) fallō/fallere – fefellī – falsum (Latin: to cheat) All Indo-European verbs that passed into Germanic as functioning verbs were strong, apart from the small group of irregular verbs discussed below. The preterite of strong verbs are the reflex of the Indo-European perfect. Because the perfect in late Indo-European was no longer simply stative, but began to be used especially of stative actions whose source was a completed action in the past (e.g., Greek), this anterior aspect of it was emphasized in a couple of Indo-European daughter languages (e.g., Latin), and so it was with Germanic that the perfect came to be used as a simple past tense. The semantic justification for this change is that actions of stative verbs generally have an implied prior inception. An example of this is the typical and widespread PIE stative *woida 'I know': one who "knows" something at some point in the past "came to know" it, much as the natural inference from noting someone in a sitting state is that a prior action of becoming seated occurred. The classical/Koine Greek perfect is essentially an early step in the development of the stative aspect to a past tense, being a hybrid of the two that emphasizes the ongoing (present/stative) effects of a past action (e.g., leloipa 'I have left"). Apparently it was this latter anterior respect that is responsible for the Indo-European perfect showing up as a past tense in Germanic, Italic, and Celtic. The Indo-European perfect took o-grade in the singular and zero grade in the dual and plural. The Germanic strong preterite shows the expected Germanic development of short o to short a in the singular and zero grade in the plural; these make up the second and third principal parts of the strong verb. The Indo-European perfect originally carried its own set of personal endings, the remnants of which are seen in the Germanic strong preterite. The reduplication characteristic of the Indo-European perfect remains in a number of verbs (seen most clearly in Gothic), a distinction by which they are grouped together as the seventh class of Germanic strong verbs.
Weak verbs
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
