Weak verbs

[download pdf]

Background and phonology

Formation

Weak verbs represent a group of younger but very numerous Germanic verbs, mostly derived from other parts of speech or from strong verbs. Unlike their strong counterparts, which form their preterites and often their past participles by way of vowel gradation (sing – sang – sung), these verbs instead use a dental suffix to form their preterites and past participles (walk – walked – walked). In Old Norse, this suffix has the basic form -ði. Since the personal endings of the verb are added to this element, however, the i is often lost; furthermore, depending on the phonological context, the ð will sometimes show up as d or t.

Thematic vowels

If you have read my write-up on noun classes, or at least its first few paragraphs, you are familiar with the concept of the thematic vowel: a sound that historically separated root from inflectional ending, and that is different for each of the noun classes. Just as this variation in thematic vowels serves as the justification for the conventional system of noun classes, so also three different thematic vowels form the basis of the three weak verb classes. Class 1 is made up of i/j-stems, class 2 contains a-stems, and class 3 represents i-stems. Far from being merely a historical grouping, this thematic background has had profound phonological effects on the audible and visible forms of the Old Norse and Modern Icelandic weak verbs. Most importantly, the thematic vowel is still visible in many present-tense forms of all three classes. In addition, it has caused sound changes in various parts of the conjugation. To understand the development from thematic vowel to medieval pronunciation and orthography, we need to be familiar with a series of phonological phenomena, the most important of which is front mutation.

NB that there is no consistent numbering, or even categorization, of the weak verb classes among grammarians. Noreen orders them by productivity and splits the i/j-stems into two (long and short stems), yielding 1) a-stems; 2) short i/j-stems; 3) long i/j-stems; 4) i-stems. Sweet and Hall likewise separate out long and short i/j-stems, but they furthermore understand i-stems as a subclass of the a-stems, yielding 1) short i/j-stems; 2a) a-stems; 2b) i-stems; 3) long i/j-stems. Valfells and Cathey number the classes in order of ascending difficulty: 1) a-stems; 2) i-stems; 3) i/j-stems; they group members of the i-stems with i-mutation in the present tense (see below) under the i/j-stems. Barnes combines i-stems and long i/j-stems into a single class 3; thus 1) short i/j-stems; 2) a-stems; 3) i-stems and long i/j-stems. The present numbering follows that used in Gordon.

Front mutation

Unlike Modern English, which has central vowels like those in bird and the second vowel of pollen, early Norse (ninth to twelfth centuries) by some definitions had an essentially binary distinction between front and back vowels:

The above image is a vowel chart or vowel diagram: constituting a schematic display of the mouth, it charts whether a sound is produced with the mouth wide open (low in the diagram) or fairly close (high in the diagram), as well as whether the raised part of the tongue is more towards the front of the organ (left side of the diagram) or towards the back (right-hand side). Although it is customary to use phonemic notation in vowel diagrams, I have chosen to use the graphemes of Old Norse in the above representation, i.e. the letters as they were written. All these sounds had long counterparts which I have left out to avoid chaos, but I have written in æ and œ because they are the only vowels whose spelling (in the standard here represented) differs from their short counterparts beyond the addition of an acute accent. Remember: these letters represent reconstructed early Old Norse, not Modern Icelandic or even fourteenth-century Icelandic.

Front mutation (most commonly specified as i-mutation) is a sound change that took place at an early stage of the Old Norse language (c. 600–900) where an /i/ or /j/ in one syllable caused a back vowel in the preceding syllable to be fronted. Like labial mutation, this is an anticipatory process: because the speaker knows she will have to raise the tip of her tongue to pronounce the following /i/ or /j/, she began to position her tongue ahead of time, thereby altering the realization of the preceding vowel. Generally, this meant that a given back vowel would be pronounced with the same qualities as before (e.g. close and rounded in the case of /u/), but with the front or tip rather than the back of the tongue raised (i.e. /y/ in the case of /u/). In the early Old Norse vowel system, this affected diphthongs as well as monophthongs:

Class 1 weak verbs have -i/j- as their thematic vowel. That is, the stem was historically followed by precisely the sound that tended to bring a preceding vowel forward in articulation. Accordingly, front mutation is a prominent phenomenon in this class. By contrast, the class 2 thematic is a back vowel, which never causes front mutation, so class 2 is not affected by it at all. The i of class 3 actually postdates the fronting process: for most of its members it had been e (i.e. /e/) in early Norse, and this class is therefore generally exempt from front mutation. However, some verbs (which we may classify as “type b”) have a different history and do display front mutation, so that they behave largely like long-stemmed members of class 1.

i-deletion

i-deletion in the context of weak verbs is a straightforward law stating the following:

• The i in the dental suffix -ði is dropped before a following vowel (spurði + um → spurðum);
• The thematic vowel i/j (class 1) or i (class 3) is dropped before the dental suffix; thus the stem lifi- yields the preterites lifði (third person singular) and lifðum (first person plural).

Paradigms

The two paradigms telja “count” and heyra “hear” represent the two subtypes of class 1 weak verbs. The phonological difference between the two is that telja is short-stemmed while heyra is based on a long stem. As noted in my explanation of the noun classes, a short stem is one whose root syllable has either a short monophthong vowel followed by no more than one consonant or a long vowel or diphthong followed by no consonant at all; any other combination is long. Short stems of class 1 show the effects of front mutation everywhere except in the preterite indicative and the past participle: the present form telr (from the short stem tel-i/j-) becomes talði in the preterite, taliðr in the participle. In all short stems of this type, the remainder of the paradigm, including the preterite subjunctive, has a front vowel. In addition, the thematic vowel in these verbs shows up in present-tense forms as -j- before a back vowel (i.e. in teljum(k) and telja(sk)). Heyra (heyr-i/j-) represents the long stems, which have front mutation throughout the paradigm, including the preterite indicative. In the long stems, the thematic vowel never surfaces as -j-; instead, it shows up as -i- across the present tense system except where displaced by a following vowel (thus cf. heyri and tel, heyrir and telr).

Both subtypes of class 1 are common, the long stems being especially numerous. Although these verbs must have front vowels in their stems, they do not have a monopoly on them; the other classes likewise have verbs with this property.

© Paul Langeslag 2011, 2018