Recently I've been helping my home students learn the past participles of some irregular verbs, in a "new" way. Basically, I show that sometimes the suffix -(e)n is added to the PRESENT stem. For example:
| Base (infinitive) | Past | Base + (e)n suffix |
|---|---|---|
| arise | arose | ARISEN [arise+n] |
| be | was/were | BEEN [be+en] |
| blow | blew | BLOWN |
| draw | drew | DRAWN |
| drive | drove | DRIVEN |
| eat | ate | EATEN |
| fall | fell | FALLEN |
| give | gave | GIVEN |
| grow | grew | GROWN |
| know | knew | KNOWN |
| mistake | mistook | MISTAKEN |
| rise | rose | RISEN |
| see | saw | SEEN |
| shake | shook | SHAKEN |
| take | took | TAKEN |
| throw | threw | THROWN |
In group 2, the -n suffix is added to the PAST stem, when it has the single "o" (Yes, I realise it's not an infallible rule, if it were, the past participles of arise, rise would be similar to CHOSEN, i.e. arosen and rosen. And the past participle of drive, should be droven.)
| Base | Past | Past + (e)n |
|---|---|---|
| break | broke | BROKEN [broke+n] |
| choose | chose | CHOSEN |
| freeze | froze | FROZEN |
| speak | spoke | SPOKEN |
| steal | stole | STOLEN |
| wake | woke | WOKEN |
In the third group, the letters t and the d are doubled before the -(e)n suffix. This "rule" seems to work well.
| Base | Past | Base/Past + (e)n |
|---|---|---|
| bite | bit | BITTEN [bit+t+en] |
| forget | forgot | FORGOTTEN [forgot+t+en] |
| hide | hid | HIDDEN [hid+d+en] |
| ride | rode | RIDDEN |
| tread | trod | TRODDEN |
| write | wrote | WRITTEN |
In group 4, the suffix changes to -ne if the verb in the PRESENT stem ends in "o"
| Base | Past | Base + ne |
|---|---|---|
| do | did | DONE [do+ne] |
| go | went | GONE |
I read that the past participle inflection, the -n suffix, goes back to Germanic. Is it, therefore, safe to say that all the verbs listed above are of Germanic origin?
The frequency of the -en suffix seems to suggest that there was no such thing as irregular verbs in Old English and today the "regular" verbs that end in -(e)d is a relatively recent development of the language.
Questions
- Did more past participles use to end with -n?
For example, (a) come––>came––>comen, (b) drink––>drank––>drinken
(c) hold––>held––>holden. Why did it change? - In group 4, were the past participles of do and go ever doen and goen respectively?
- Did been and seen use to have two syllables? Were they ever pronounced "be•en" and "se•en"? Etymonline has nothing about their historical pronunciations.
Best Answer
Once upon a time, there were six regular classes of "strong" Germanic verb that formed their four principal parts by a — mostly predictable — vowel change in the stem. This at least partially survives today:
In contrast, "weak" verbs had to be propped up by a final dental stop:
This vowel change in strong verbs is called either vowel gradation or by its originally German name: ablaut. While weak verbs were by no means new to proto-Germanic or even Proto-Indo-European, they are still the only way to make new verbs, since a strong verb can only be added to the language by prefixing.
A seventh, sort of catch-all class was added to include verbs which linguists determined used not only a vowel change to indicate tense, but whose stems were originally repeated. Hold was originally in this class: cf. Gothic hald, haihald/hehald (I hold, I/he held).
There was also a hybrid class where a vowel change occurred in the present stem only, the preterite and past participle reverting to the original stem with weak endings. A goodly number of these are still kicking around:
While these 6+1 classes were still extant in the oldest Germanic languages — Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, and Gothic — change was already in the air. To preserve the 6+1 scheme in OE, for instance, class III had to be divided into five sub-classes to account for vowel changes caused by various consonantal environments. In all these languages, however, the past participle of strong verbs ended in -[v]n, in OE and OHG, an -an, while those two West Germanic languages also added the perfective ge- prefix. This became a y- in ME and eventually disappeared, but is still present in modern Dutch and German.
These old -en participles survive today mostly as adjectives:
Why did the -en suffix otherwise disappear? Likely for the same reason as the ge-/y- prefix: the double marker to signal "past participle" was no longer felt necessary.
Did more past participles end in -en? The adjectives show that to be true, but there are also quite common verbs that have changed from strong to weak or are still in the process of doing so, like strive. Help was originally a strong verb, even in ME:
Now the third in this list of principle parts is the primary reason the original 6+1 order became modern chaos: old Germanic languages had two preterite stems, not just one. When the second preterite, used for the second person singular familiar (thou) and plural forms, began to disappear, the vowel in a now merged past tense could follow the first preterite, the second, or the participle.
This is the same pattern as sing, sang, sung, but the merged preterite of find followed the second rather than the first preterite, yielding
This unpredictable paradigm levelling has forced English teachers simply to call strong verbs irregular and be done with it.
To the specific verbs you've asked about: OE gebeon > ME (y)been, one can assume intermediate stages on the way to a monophthong. The same could be said for OE (ge)sewan, (ge)segen > (y)seen, but by the time the two are written with ee, they're probably monosyllables. Done and gone (rhymed with "groan") were by this point most likely also monosyllables, regardless of orthography, which in this time period can be quite arbitrary.