Anglo-Saxon: strong vs weak words - which ones survived and why? (2025)

Hello all.

I'm quite interested in learning one of the Anglo-Saxon languages (probably Mercian since it was the first to reach prominence and was based where I'm from). I don't know if I will due to time constraints, but also because my interest lies primarily in its relationship with and influence on Early/Old English, Middle English and the later developments up to Modern English, and I don't know how useful it would be to learn the whole language to that end.

So, one of my questions is this:

In Anglo-Saxon languages they had strong and weak verbs (and strong and weak nouns and adjectives too?). What made a word strong, what made it weak, how were they denoted, and are there any correlations to the words and forms of the words that passed down into modern English (i.e. which ones survived more and why)?

I know it seems like three questions but I think it's all part and parcel of the same thing.

Unfortunately, I don't really have anything further to contribute as I am not yet studying Anglo-Saxon, so I eagerly and gratefully await anyone's patience in answering.

Thanks in advance.

Short and precise: the ones that did survive were the ones with the highest frequency in everyday language use.

Originally a great many Anglo-Saxon were strong (more even than in modern German as German too has lost lots of strong conjugations).

sokol said:

Short and precise: the ones that did survive were the ones with the highest frequency in everyday language use.

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Of course this is the case! I should have been clearer in my question: which of the strong or weak words survived more frequently?

Maybe to answer this I need to know the logic between defining a word strong or weak: I don't know anything about this system. Was there any logic, or was it arbitrary, or was it a logic we no longer follow? If there was a logic supposing that strong words were the ones we needed most often it would suggest that more strong words survived in Modern English. If it were based more like gender assignations (which at times seem very arbitrary) then there's no reason to assume one or the other form would have survived more often.

It's a bit complicated but does anyone get what I'm asking?!

Originally a great many Anglo-Saxon words were strong (more even than in modern German as German too has lost lots of strong conjugations).

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I assume you missed out the word I've inserted in red...!? Or were you talking about the big, strong heroic Anglo-Saxon people?! So what does it mean to have strong and weak conjugations? What functions do they have?

More weak verbs survived than strong verbs. Strongs verbs are simply those that had internal changes from tense to tense e.g. I sing, I sang, I have sung. Weak verbs didn't change like this. They added endings, e.g. I stop, I stopped, I have stopped. Exactly how they were conjugated in Anglo-Saxon I'm not certain, but it was along the same lines. Thus strong verbs are less numerous, but often more common in speech e.g.
I ran, I run; I swim, I swam; I fall, I fell etc.

In addition, strong verbs have older roots in Proto-Indo-European than weak verbs (which are "relatively" new) and thus tend to describe more basic and common verbs.

As far as I know, only verbs fall into the two categories: the strong and the weak. Are there such things as strong adjectives and strong nouns?

Weak verbs have the -ed forms for the preterite and the past participle. All the other verbs are strong.

A strong verb undergoes a vowel change, so it can have up to three vocalic degrees, and a fourth one if you include the corresponding noun. e.g. sing, sang, sung, a song.

The number of strong verbs has never ceased to decrease in English so you will certainly find more strong verbs in Old-English and in Mercian.

Some strong verbs were lost along the way, but most just became weak.
e.g. seethe, sod, sodden > seethe, seethed, seethed.

Conversely, some weak verbs became strong in the 20th century.
e.g. to dive, dove, diven

Mr Punch said:

Maybe to answer this I need to know the logic between defining a word strong or weak: I don't know anything about this system. Was there any logic, or was it arbitrary, or was it a logic we no longer follow?

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If you're talking about verbs, English (and other Germanic) strong verbs are an instance of the phenomenon known as ablaut. This is basically the name for a regular system of vowel variation that existed in Proto-Indo-European, which has been (I guess) best preserved in the Germanic strong verbs. (I can't vouch for the accuracy of all the details in the linked Wikipedia articles, but you'll get at least the basic idea from them.)

Qcumber said:

As far as I know, only verbs fall into the two categories: the strong and the weak. Are there such things as strong adjectives and strong nouns?

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Yes, but it's a different phenomenon, and I think that the similarity in names is accidental (and thus likely confusing for a reader that first encounters these notions). For Germanic verbs, "strong" denotes irregular tense formation by vowel variation, whereas for Germanic adjectives and nouns, "strong" denotes certain classes of case declensions, which are however still formed the "normal" way, i.e. by suffixes, and not by mutations of internal vowels. However, while modern English still has a large number of strong verbs, it no longer has strong declensions of verbs and adjectives, since it has lost the case declensions altogether.

If I understand it correctly, "strong" and "weak" nouns are just the names for two different noun declensions (like the numbered declensions in Latin), while for adjectives, "strong" and "weak" are two alternative declensions that can be applied to any (?) adjective depending on its syntactic role. Therefore, to be fully precise, there are strong and weak nouns, but an adjective gets strongly or weakly declined depending on the role it plays in the sentence. By the way, these terms are used with the same meanings in modern German (which is grammatically quite similar to Old English).

This electronic Old English textbook contains detailed information about the terminology used for each class of words (it's conveniently divided into chapters covering the morphology of individual word classes).

Well, I'll give it another try.

Mr Punch said:

Maybe to answer this I need to know the logic between defining a word strong or weak: I don't know anything about this system. Was there any logic, or was it arbitrary, or was it a logic we no longer follow? If there was a logic supposing that strong words were the ones we needed most often it would suggest that more strong words survived in Modern English. If it were based more like gender assignations (which at times seem very arbitrary) then there's no reason to assume one or the other form would have survived more often.

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The Ablaut is probably what you refer to (and not other things too characteristed as a 'strong' and 'weak' oppostion), so verbs like (in German) 'sing - sang - gesungen' and English 'write - wrote - 'written' (not so easy to find an English example where all of the vowels are pronounced different).

It is inflection within the word like Semitic 'root inflection' (each Semitic word, in historic times, consisting of two and, in modern times, consisting of three consonants filled with different vowels).
From one of my university teachers I've got the example of Semitic root *ktb or *ktp (I'm not quite sure anymore) which could become 'kitab' = book (or similar) and with other vowels a different meaning, but related to 'book' (probably an Arabic speaker could correct me here or complete the example - thanks ;-).
This root inflection is one of the things why some linguists think that there is a deep, old connection between Indoeuropean and Semitic language - be it that there was language contact involved or that both language branches go back to a deeper Indoeuropean/ Semitic root: none of which ever got proved (and probably never could be proved).

However, this root inflection as a systematic principle was lost long before IE branched off the modern languages (Germanic, Romanic, Slavic, Aryan, etc.). It became arbitrary at some point in the history of Indoeuropean languages, and ever since the number of verbs with Ablaut ever decreased.

In some languages, like German, there are still quite a number of Ablaut-verbs (still decreasing in number, and there are dublettes for some verbs i. e. strong and weak form co-existing), but in Nordic languages there too are many, and probably Islandic has even more than German - could an Islandic-German bilingual say something about that, please?
In English there are only few Ablaut-verbs left, and even then the Ablaut is not retained in all tenses.

This about what you wanted to know?

Thank you all, some excellent information.

I recently heard, that some American mathematicians, with no linguistical background, have made a system, where one can predict, when strong verbs becomes weak. higher frequency, better survival. It follows a very accurate pattern.

A perfect example of this is the Danish word: "gale" (to crow). A word, that in the last 100 years has become less frequent. It was a strong verb, and past tense was "gol" (hanen gol). This, today, sounds a bit archaic and the past tense is know more often "galede" (hanen galede).

Lingvisten said:

I recently heard, that some American mathematicians, with no linguistical background, have made a system, where one can predict, when strong verbs becomes weak. higher frequency, better survival. It follows a very accurate pattern.

A perfect example of this is the Danish word: "gale" (to crow). A word, that in the last 100 years has become less frequent. It was a strong verb, and past tense was "gol" (hanen gol). This, today, sounds a bit archaic and the past tense is know more often "galede" (hanen galede).

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Does one need to be a mathematician to predict this? As soon as a strong verb ceases to be used, it survives as a noun, and a weak verb is derived from the noun.

Lingvisten said:

The mathematics is not needed to predict, that it happens, but to predict when, exactly, it is going to happen.

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Do you mean in terms of exact time lapse? I doubt it.

Qcumber said:

As soon as a strong verb ceases to be used, it survives as a noun, and a weak verb is derived from the noun.

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Thank you. I just came back to this thread to add this point which nobody had brought up explicitly yet.

According the wiki piece on Old English morphology, weak verbs were derived from nouns (hence the transformation Qcumber describes) and from foreign verb stems, which I can only assume explains why many strong verbs became weak in the Middle English period after the influx of so much Anglo-Norman vocabulary.

I agree with Athaulf about the difference between linguistic function of strong/weak verbs vs strong/weak nouns/adjectives.

Athaulf said:

However, while modern English still has a large number of strong verbs, it no longer has strong declensions of verbs and adjectives, since it has lost the case declensions altogether.

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We actually do decline some adjectives in English: blonde, leaden, wooden, olden, golden, oaken -- though the non-declined equivalents are more common, I can think of at least one example where declining the adjective makes for a preposterous thought: at our cottage, we have a wood stove -- but never would I want a wooden stove in my kitchen, the fire hazard would be too great!

I've also noticed that, when people use the adjective "golden," they often mean "gold-coloured but not real gold," while in actuality "golden" is simply the adjectival form of the noun "gold" (though it can also refer to the color, such as in "golden hair.") I am very proud of my "golden wedding ring" which I assure you is real gold, and not for a minute would I object to receiving "five golden rings" for Christmas!

Qcumber said:

These are not real adjectives, but obsolete past participles used as adjectives.

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What is the verb form of Gold? Wood? Oak? Lead? These adjectival endings are identical to adjectival endings used in modern German, which is closely related to Anglo-Saxon.

Blumengarten said:

What is the verb form of Gold? Wood? Oak? Lead? These adjectival endings are identical to adjectival endings used in modern German, which is closely related to Anglo-Saxon.

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Now can we say golden is declined while gold is not? I don't think so; -en is only a morphological ending, not a morpho-syntactical ending.

Indeed German has -en adjectives, e.g. Gold > golden, but this is not a declension; it's a derivation.

German has another -en that is a declension mark that occurs both in the strong and weak declensions of the adjective. Let's have a look at some examples from my grammar book.

roten Weines [singular masculine genitive] = of red wine
roten Goldes [singular neutral genitive] = of red gold
roten Weinen [plural dative] = to red wines

-en also occurs in most oblique cases of weak adjectives.

Alle grossen Männer = all great men