Participles in Old English

Voice
	Active	Passive	NE
Tense
Present	berende	-	bearing
	secende		saying
	anende farende		going 'travelling*
Past	eān	eboren	gone, born
	efaren	esædd	'who has departed, depar­
			said'

As seen from the table the forms of the two participles were strictly differentiated. Participle I was formed from the present tense stem (the infinitive without the endings -an, -ion) with the help of the suffix -ende. Participle II had a stem of its own – in strong verbs it was marked by a certain grade of the root-vowel interchange and by the suffix -en; with weak verbs it ended in -d/-t. Participle II was commonly marked by the prefix e-.

Participles were employed predicatively and attributively like adjectives and shared their grammatical categories: they were declined as weak and strong and agreed with nouns in number, gender and case.

Thus, the OE verb was characterised by many peculiar features. Though the verb had few grammatical categories, its paradigm had a complicated structure: verbs fell into numerous morphological classes and employed a variety of form-building means. All the forms of the verb were synthetic, as analytical forms were only beginning to appear. The non-finite forms had little in common with the finite forms and shared many features with the nominal parts of speech.

4. Conclusions

1. The verbal system in OE included finite and non-finite forms, which differed more than those in Mod E, since verbals were not only conjugated but also declined, like nominal parts of speech.

2. The system of conjugation of the OE verb included the categories of tense, mood, number and person.

   1. The category of person involved the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd persons; their forms differed only in the singular forms of the indicative mood.

   2. The category of number was formed by the opposition of the singular and plural forms.

   3. The category of tense was presented by the present and past forms. The meaning of futurity was expressed by means of the present forms accompanied with an appropriate adverb or a combination of the modal verb with the infinitive.

   4. The category of mood included the forms of the indicative, imperative and oblique moods, with the latter being used both for expression of real and problematic actions ( which are expressed by two different moods in Mod E), and in place of the indicative mood to render indirect speech.

3. All OE verbs can be subdivided into a number of groups in accordance with the grammatical means used to build their principal stems: root vowel interchange and suffixation.

   1. Strong verbs used ablaut, or root vowel interchange as the principal means of expressing different grammatical categories. Grammatical endings were added directly to the root (stem) of the verb. Strong verbs are the most ancient verbs of the language. There were 7 classes of strong verbs, which differed in their gradation series depending on the initial phonetic structure of the verb stem.

   2. Weak verbs are younger than strong verbs. They used suffixation as a principal grammatical means to form their stems. This way of building the principal forms was most productive, and new verbs that entered the language generally built their forms on analogy with the weak verbs. In contrast to strong verbs, weak verbs had a stem-forming suffix that followed the root and preceded the grammatical ending. In accordance with the character of this suffix the weak verbs are subdivided into three classes.