Old English verbal system: strong verbs.

built their principal forms with the help of root vowel interchange (they made use of IE ablaut with certain modifications due to phonetic changes and environment) Strong verbs had 4 stems which were formed by means of vowel gradation (vowel interchange, grammatical ablaut) in the stems and by adding certain suffixes characteristic of each stem: The suffix -an was used for the Inf., no ending for the Past sg., -on for the Past pl., -en for Part.2. Strong verbs are usually divided into 7 classes, differing in the root vowel. The vowel gradation was of 2 kinds: qualitative (1-5 class) and quantitative (6 class). In some verbs vowel gradation was accompanied by consonant interchange Ablaut – an independent vowel interchange unconnected with any phonetic conditions (the earliest set of vowel interchange, which dates from Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European) Strong verbs are: very old group of words (characterized as core vocabulary) in general more basic to everyday communication closed class (the irregularity of the strong verbs is due to the fact that verbs of this type are much less numerous than weak verbs. In Old English there only over 300 of them) restricted, meaning that few new verbs in the language will be taken into this group. The strong verbs in OE are usually divided into seven classes. Classes from 1 to 6 use vowel gradation which goes back to the IE ablaut-series modified in different phonetic conditions in accordance with PG and Early OE sound changes. Class 7 includes reduplicating verbs, which originally built their past forms by means of repeating the root-morpheme; this doubled root gave rise to a specific kind of root-vowel interchange. The principal forms of all the strong verbs have the same endings irrespective of class: -an for the Infinitive, no ending in the Past sg stem, -on in the form of Past pl, -en for Participle II. In the verbs of Class 6 the original IE gradation was purely quantitative; in PG it was transformed into a quantitative-qualitative series.