What is a verb? Verbs are a class of words. Verbs tell you what a person is doing in a sentence, or what they are. They are either action verbs (like Modern English "do" or "make" as in "I do this" or "He makes cars") or stative verbs (like Modern English "be" or "become" as in "I will be a dog" and "You become angry").

Verb Agreement

Verbs have to agree with the subject of the sentence in number (singular when the subject of the verb is just one, and plural when the subject of the verb is more than one), and person (I, you, he/she/it). This is sometimes the case even in Modern English, but more so for Old English. An example of how verbs change to agree for number and person in Modern English is when we add "-s" to third person singular verb, as in "He sings well"; but we don't add "-s" for anything else, including third person plural, for example "They sing well".

Look at this example of how an Old English changed depending on the person and number it is used with, compared with how it is done to a lesser extent in Modern English:

You can see that there are four different ways the word "gān" is changed for different people and numbers in Old English:

1. First person singular (iċ gā - I go)
2. Second person singular (þū gǣst - you alone go)
3. Third person singular (hē/hēo/hit gǣþ - he/she/it goes)
4. Plural (which is the same for all people) (ƿē/ġē/hīe gāþ - we/you all/they go).

Compare to Modern English, which is simpler and only has two forms:

1. "Goes" (third person singular)
2. "Go" (for everything else)

Example of a verb

Here is an example of the various parts of one Old English verb singan, "to sing".

Not every verb is conjugated exactly like this: this, as it happens, is a Class III strong verb, and verbs are conjugated differently according to their class. More details of how verbs are conjugated will be supplied later. First, we should look at what the various parts of the verb are for.

The infinitives

In Modern English, we really have two infinitives, as exemplified by the phrases: "I can sing" and "I want to sing". The choice of which to use is dictated by the role that the infinitive plays in the sentence.

In the same way, Old English has two infinitives for each verb: in the case of "to sing" they would be singan and tō singenne. The choice of which to use essentially follows the same rules as in Modern English. The plain infinitive is used after modal verbs such as "can" or "may" or "shall". The "tō" infinitive is used:

• After verbs which require an infinitive but which are not modal, as in hīe ƿilniaþ tō singenne ("They want to sing").

• After an adjective, as in ic eom gearu tō singenne ("I am ready to sing").

• To indicate purpose, as in þū ārise tō singenne ("You got up to sing").

The present participle

The present participle (in our example singende) is the equivalent of the Modern English present participle (in this case, "singing") It could be used as an adjective to show that someone was doing something, or usually did something, for example se singenda man - "the singing man". However, it was only rarely used to show a continuous or currently happening action, for example, iċ eom singende þone sang ("I am singing the song"); it would be much more normal for an Anglo-Saxon to simply say iċ singe þone sang, using the present indicative.

The present and past indicative

Old English really only has two tenses: the present and the past (or preterite). Each of these tenses therefore has to play several roles.

So a statement using the present tense, such as iċ singe can mean: "I sing", or "I am singing", or "I will sing", or "I will be singing". (The use of the present for the future is still acceptable in Modern English: for example, it is perfectly OK to say: "I take my driving test on Tuesday.")

Meanwhile a statement using the preterite, such as iċ sang, can mean "I sang" or "I was singing" or "I have sung".

You might, then, consider the Old English language as being primitive and inexpressive by contrast with Modern English. However, this is not really the case. After all, in almost every other respect Old English has more grammar than Modern English, and yet we seem to get by: for example, in Modern English we have no grammatical distinction between the second person singular and plural, and yet this never seems to cause any confusion, because context is almost always sufficient to resolve any confusion that might arise, by using other words with the pronoun (and some dialects, particularly in Northern England, still use "thou" and its forms).

The imperative

The imperative in Old English is just like that in Modern English: it is used for giving commands, so sing in Old English means the same as "sing!" in Modern English. The only difference is that as with the other parts of the verb, the imperative in Old English is inflected according to number, so that if you wanted to tell more than one person to sing, you would say singaþ. Unlike in some other languages, the imperative form can be negated directly, by prefixing it with ne as you would to negate any other verb: ne singaþ! "don't sing!"

The first-person plural imperative is usually formed with uton and the infinitive: uton singan! "Let's sing!"

The subjunctive

Old English has present and past subjunctives. The subjunctive is used in Old English to describe hypothetical or counter-factual situations.

The true Old English subjunctive does not occur often in Modern English; but it is sometimes used where no other phrase will do. For example, the National Enquirer, not noted for the excessive formality of its grammar, has this to say in an item of gossip about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie:

But the 48-year-old “Moneyball” star finally snapped when Angie, 37, insisted that he go to rehab to conquer his demons, insiders say.

There is really no substitute for "that he go". If we tried to substitute: "that he goes", then Ms. Jolie would be insisting that he does presently go to rehab, which he doesn't. If we tried to substitute: "that he went", then she'd be insisting that he used to go into rehab, which he didn't. If we substituted: "that he ought to go" or "that he should go", then this would say that she was insisting that this was the right thing for him to do, but not that she was insisting that he do it. Only the subjunctive form "that he go" properly expresses what Ms. Jolie was insisting; that she was presenting him with an ultimatum.

In Old English the usage is rather broader: it would include "that he ought to go", and "that he should go".

Here's another example of the true subjunctive in Modern English, in an article discussing the movie The Fly:

When David Cronenberg was hired as director, one condition was that he be able to extensively rewrite the script.

In this case, "that he was" would also be perfectly good Modern English.

We can see more uses of the subjunctive if we go back a few centuries, and look at Shakespeare or the King James Bible. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet exclaims:

If he be married, my grave is like to be my wedding bed.

Again, Juliet is discussing a hypothetical situation, so she uses the subjunctive. Nowadays, any English speaker would write: "If he is married".

In Modern English, then, we tend to use the subjunctive as the last resort. In Old English, however, the subjunctive is frequently used, and often mandatory. For example, consider the sentence:

Ġif messe-preost his āġen līf rīhtliċe fadie, þonne is rīht þæt his ƿurþscipe ƿexe."

If we translate this into Modern English, keeping the subjunctive mood, that would come out as:

"If a priest govern his own life rightly, it is right that his honor grow."

This seems strange and stilted in Modern English, and we would be more likely to drop all indication of the subjunctive and translate it into Modern English as follows:

"If a priest governs his own life rightly, it is right that his honor grows."

But if we tried to drop the subjunctive in the Old English, and rewrite the passage in the indicative, as:

Ġif messe-preost his āġen līf rīhtliċe fadaþ, þonne is rīht þæt his ƿurþscipe ƿexeþ."

... then this would not really be grammatical. We would use the indicative and say "fadaþ" and "ƿexeþ" if we wanted to assert of a particular priest that he is arranging his own life well, and that as a result his honor is growing. But instead the author wished to assert of a general and hypothetical priest that if he arranges his own life well, then his honor ought to grow as a consequence; therefore he had to use the subjunctive.

So we find, for example, subjunctive forms such as:

Ūs dafenaþ þæt ƿē ƿaċien.

This might be translated as "It is fitting that we be wakeful". We couldn't keep this meaning if we put it into the indicative and wrote:

Ūs dafenaþ þæt ƿē ƿaċiaþ.

... because if that was grammatical at all, it would mean "It is fitting that we are awake", which has a different meaning.

Past participle

The past participle works like the Modern English past participle, so that ġesungen just means "sung". As with the Modern English past participle, it can be used as an adjective, and it can also be used with the verb "to have" to form a perfect tense, as in Modern English "I have sung the song". However, in Old English the participle tends to go at the end of the clause, as it does in German: iċ hæbbe þone sang ġesungen.

Verb Classes

There are several types of verbs in Old English, more than in Modern English, which has many weak (love/loved/loved), some strong (sing/sang/sung), and a few irregular verbs (be/was/been). Old English has four types of weak verbs, typically called Class 1a, Class 1b, Class 2, and Class 3. Strong verbs are typically arranged in seven classes, according to their vowel-changes (ablaut). All verbs do have the following in common: the infinitive ends in -an for nearly all verbs (a smaller portion end in -ian and -rian), the present participle ends in -ende (a smaller portion end in -iende), the present plural is always -aþ, and the inflected infinitive ends in -enne.

Weak Verbs

Weak verbs are often called regular verbs in most English texts, because they have a regular past tense in -ed, with very few exceptions. In Old English, these verbs were also the majority of verbs, most often derived from nouns, adjectives, and other verbs. While we can generalize across all classes, it will be easier to lay them out and allow the reader to see the similarities for themselves.

Strong verbs

In strong verbs, the vowel in the stem of the verb changes according to person, tense, and mood; this change is known as ablaut or gradation. Relics of this system survive in Modern English in such variations as "sing", "sang", "sung" or "write", "wrote", "written".

Although strong verbs are fewer in number than weak verbs, they include some very common verbs, and so you will come across them often.

Preterite-present verbs

In a preterite-present verb, the past (preterite) tense has taken on a present-tense meaning, and the verb has then acquired a weak past tense.

As an example, consider the verb ƿitan (to know). It is derived from what was once a perfectly ordinary verb meaning "to see" (cognate, as it happens, with the Latin verb "videre"). It is not hard to understand how the past tense could have taken on a present-tense meaning; if you saw something in the past, then you know about it in the present.

Hence we have forms such as iċ ƿāt ("I know") and ƿē ƿiton ("we know") which look like the past tense of a strong verb, specifically a class I strong verb, but which have a present-tense meaning. Then a weak past tense is formed with a dental suffix.

While the verb ƿitan has not survived into Modern English, a number of preterite-present verbs have, such as "can" and "shall"; it is because they are preterite-present verbs that the 3rd person present indicative is "he can" and "he shall" rather than "he cans" and "he shalls".

Preterite-present verbs can be learned with five principal parts; the rest of the forms can be predicted based on these. Old English has twelve of them, not counting compound forms:

• To form the long infinitive, take the infinitive and replace the -an with -enne: tō āgenne
• To form the indicative plural, take the infinitive and replace the -an with -on: āgon
• As always, to form the subjunctive plural, add -n to the subjunctive singular: āgen
• The preterite is conjugated as follows: iċ āhte, þū āhtest, hē āhte, wē āhton.
• The past subjunctive uses the preterite stem and is conjugated as follows: iċ/þū/hē āhte, wē āhten.
• The singular imperative is the same as the singular subjunctive: āge
• For the plural imperative, take the singular imperative and replace the -e with -aþ: āgaþ
• To form the past participle, take the infinitive and replace the -an with -en: āgen. The prefix ġe- may optionally be added as well, except in the case of ġemunan and ġenugan, which already have it.

Full conjugations for the preterite-present verbs are shown in the tables below. The only reason there are three tables is so that they fit on the page; there is no particular significance to a verb being in one table rather than another.

Some of the entries in the table are not actually attested in manuscripts, but are reconstructions of how the verb forms probably would have looked if they were.

Irregular Verbs

This class consists of four verbs which have little in common except that they are very difficult to classify. It is usual in any language that the most irregular verbs are also among the most common, and these are a case in point.

References

• List of verbs with dative objects
• List of verbs with accusative objects
• List of verbs with dative or accusative objects