The Old English Weak Preterites Without Medial Vowel

Abstract

1. Sievers' Law of Syncopation of middle vowels has laid the foundation for our present understanding of the forms of the preterite and past participle of the first class of weak verbs: The medial vowel disappears before the period of mutation if the stem syllable is long, and is preserved if it is short. While Sievers had stated the law for West Germanic only, its somewhat modified application to Norse was obvious, so that chaos was apparently reduced to order. Irregular forms like leƷde, sœƷde were termed “anormal” by Sievers, and he adds the objective statement that several short stems in k, t, d, l form their preterite “nach Art der langsilbigen,” e.g., OE. reahte, sette, tredde, tealde. Two years later, Paul added the hypothesis that these preterites had had no medial vowel since Germanic times, supporting his view by certain criteria of such Germanic origin. He remarks: “Das Angelsächsische repräsentiert für uns im grossen und ganzen noch die eigentümlichste Stufe, und zwar liegt das offenbar daran, dass hier im Gegensatz zum Althochdeutschen und Altsächsischen der Umlaut der Synkopierung vorausgegangen ist.” It seems that Sievers never quite agreed with Paul's generalization of the scope of these preterites. As late as 1898, he postulates only a West Germanic basis for the “Rückumlaut” in verbs of the type cwellan-cwealde, sēceansōhte. But otherwise the view has been fairly generally accepted.