Linguistics 310: History of English
Project 1: The evolution of the strong verbs

Due date: Monday, October 10, 2016

It is generally assumed that the ratio of strong verbs to weak in modern English is much lower than in earlier periods of the language. This decline, if real, could be due to several factors, acting either alone or in combination. Some obvious ones are:

  1. Addition of new verbs to the language through borrowing. Since only the weak class is productive, all or almost oll of the new verbs will be weak.
  2. Different rates of obsolescence of strong and weak verbs. If, for some reason, strong verbs became more "difficult" or less "natural," there might be a tendency to avoid them.
  3. The shift of originally strong verbs into the weak class. If learners don't hear a verb very often in the past tense, they might assume that it is regular, i.e., weak.
This project is an attempt to find out how strong the tendencies in (2) and (3) might be. The following handouts, which you should download, contain lists of Old English strong and weak verbs. The lists were made by Don Ringe at different times and contain overlaps. Your tasks are as follows:

First, extract the verbs by class from these lists and for each verb, find out whether it is still used. In many cases, this will be obvious, as, for example ceosan, 'to choose'. But in cases of doubt, and always when you think a verb has fallen out of use, check in the online Oxford English Dictionary. The OED and the Middle English Dictionary will be useful in finding out what the modern forms of Old English verbs might be when this is not obvious from the translations given in the handouts. Both of these resources are available through the library web site. You should count words labeled "obsolete," "archaic" or "rare" as extinct. You might also want to record the date of last attestation for such verbs to give an idea of when the verb fell out of use. With this data, estimate the relative likelihood that an Old English strong versus a weak verb has fallen out of use over the centuries.

Second, for each strong verb on the lists that has survived to the present day, record whether it is still strong or has shifted to the weak class. As a standard of whether the verb is strong or weak, use the online "Oxford Dictionary of English," which, unlike the OED, lists the past tenses of strong verbs explicitly. Weak verbs have no listing of the past tense in that dictionary. Calculate the likelihood that strong verbs overall and verbs of the different strong classes have become weak.

Briefly discuss your results.