Old English Grammar Byte 4: Weak and Strong Verbs

Learn about Old English weak and strong verbs in this video.

Writing and on camera: Thijs Porck, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Camera and animations: Thomas J. Vorisek

[justaperson]

"let's conclude"
*title card: Conclusion"
"great, now that we've concluded"

[Hainero]

I love the clear description of the subjunctive in modern English. Spanish uses the subjunctive as well and Spanish students say all the time how great it is that English doesn't have that sort of thing. LOL!!! I try to explain but since it is so rarely used it's hard to get them to understand the rule. In Spanish, was = fue. But, "if I were a rich man" = si yo fuera un hombre rico. The difference is in "fue" and "fuera" where fue is the past tense and fuera is the subjunctive.

[Ninnybroth]

These are great! Nice graphics, clear teaching, really well-organized. I'm in my first semester of Old English at school. Hope you keep making more!

[cartylaser]

Brilliantly informative video! I want to make a few points:

It is important to remember that "Old English" was not internally static on grammar and phonology. It's kind of like how there wasn't suddenly a load of frications of stops, monophthongisations, and vowel phoneme convergences in Greek the moment Alexander the Great died, but the massive pronunciation change (mostly bad, if you ask me) that is called "Koine Greek phonology" happened gradually, over around 600 years. Old English didn't suddenly and exactly become Middle English as soon as Duke William of Normandy was crowned King William of England on 25/12/1066. While someone probably ought to learn about the extensively morphological case system if they're serious about learning Old English, they should probably also be aware that it was already mostly degraded before interference by Old French and Anglo-Norman dealt it the final blow, having suffered interference by Old Norse (due to a desire for ON-OE mutual intelligibility in the Danelaw) and redundancy through non-phonemic laxing.

Until relatively recently, I was under the impression that, while the case system was extensively declensional, the verb system wasn't much more conjugational than in Modern English, but then I read that it was. This video confirms my suspicion that it still wasn't as conjugational as Latin or even as Spanish. The 1st and 3rd person singular morphological equivalence in past tense, however, _does_ remind me of the same deal in Spanish's imperfect tense and in Spanish's conditional aspect.

Now, I want to discuss mood and tense. You said that Old English only has 2 tenses while Latin has 6, and that Modern English doesn't use the subjunctive mood very much. This is true if you only count morphological difference as different tense or mood. I don't, and I believe most don't. As you point out, participles in OE can take auxiliary verbs like to be and to have. These would standardly form progressive/continuous and perfect tenses, would they not? And Modern English, as you point out, doesn't have much morphological subjunctive mood. But much subjunctive mood, it still has. It's just that it's usually not conveyed by inflection but just using adverbs like "perhaps" and aux modal verbs like "may" and "might", as well as indirect-statement verbs like to doubt and to wish, as well as the "let [accusative subject]" construct (for the jussive subjunctive).

[dxmrh]

Where are the other videos you have promised!! 😭😨

[joalexsg]

Excellent class! At first I was afraid I wouldn't be able to benefit from the charts due to the tiny letters - they're unfeasible to my poor eyesight - but when you started showing each item with bigger letters I was relieved:-) Thank you so much, I've subscribed to the channel giving the due thumbs up and sharing this awesome video!

[michaelmuller]

please provide more videos! your students need them!

[swordofcoffee]

More please! These are fascinating and informative.

[cathiagis]

Your videos are very helpful, so glad I found them Thank you!

[khouloudsegdal]

Your videos are very helpful, thank you!!

[discoveralia]

Thank you so much for this great and clear explatations. You are a life saver!

[rebecamugwort]

Oh no! I’ve come to the end! Will there be more of these?

[robertofranciscomonsalvesp]

Dankie vir jou videos. Ek het baie geleer. Jy is 'n goed onderwyser.

[joshadams]

Interesting tidbit on your accent. Your English is so good that I assumed that you are English. But there was something unusual about your accent: it is intermittently rhotic. I looked at the description and saw that you are Dutch.

[nicholasjagger]

Any chance of the second film on verbs?

[rachelsmith]

This is excellent! Are there more of these? You mention in several videos, that you plan to dive more deeply into certain topics (such as i-mutation). Are those available anywhere? Even for purchase or download?

[Pat-Van-Canada]

there was no indication that this video would have violent content and I was watching it with my son when an image of a guy having his head split open popped up

[Strandjutter]

Dank voor deze interessante én leerzame videos!!

[kaairi]

Will the other videos ever come out? they were so helpful!

[khalilovak]

hi, it is very useful video, but l don't understand why irregular verbs forms are different, how language change influenced to the irregular verbs