Early Modern English Grammar

Verbs

• The present tense. The second person singular inflection –est naturally declined in importance as the use of thou declined, giving rise to the current arrangement whereby in the present tense only the third singular is marked and all other persons take the base form.
• At the start of the period, the normal third person singular ending in standard southern English was –eth. The form -(e)s, originally from Northern dialect, replaced –eth in most kinds of use during the seventeenth century. A few common short forms, chiefly doth, hath, continued often to be written, but it seems likely that these were merely graphic conventions.
• Forming the past tense and past participle. The class of ‘strong’ verbs (those which indicate tense by a vowel change and do not have a dental segment added) included a number of verbs which are now only ‘weak’
• Examples include: creep: crope, cropen; delve: dolve, dolven; help: holp, holpen; melt: molt, molten; seethe: sod, sodden

Verbs

• A few ‘weak’ verbs moved into the strong class during the period, including dig, spit, and stick.
• The formation of the past tense and past participle of strong verbs showed more variation in early modern English than today. There were a number of changes which began in Middle English and whose results have now been fossilized in present English but which produced a variety of forms in this period.
• These were: i. patterning the past tense on the past participle (as in tore after torn); ii. adapting the past tense or past participle to verbs with a different pattern (as in slung after sung, etc.); iii. patterning the past participle on the past tense (as in sat) iv. dropping the –en suffix of the past participle (as in sung as opposed to ridden).

Verbs

• For example, write had the regular past tense wrote, but also found were writ (with the vowel of the past participle) and wrate (patterned on gave or brake); the participle was written or writ (with loss of –en) and wrote (based on the past tense) was also found. Verbs like bear, break, speak, etc., regularly formed their past tenses with a (bare, brake, spake) and this pattern was even extended to other verbs (wrate, drave). Owing to the Great Vowel Shift these past forms lost their distinctiveness from the present stem (since in a widespread variety of pronunciation, the long a of the past became identical with the long open e of the present) and after 1600 forms with o from the past participle (bore, broke, spoke) became normal.
• Regular ‘weak’ verbs in Middle English formed their past tense and past participles in –ed, pronounced as a separate syllable, as it still is in a few fossilized forms such as belovèd, blessèd. During the sixteenth century the vowel was lost in this ending except where the preceding consonant was t or d (e.g. in hated) and the d of the ending was devoiced to [t] after a voiceless consonant (e.g. in locked as opposed to logged). Present English spelling does not regularly show these three variants [id], [d], [t] but in early modern English ‘phonetic’ spellings (’d, d, ’t, t) are quite often found. (This can lead to the obscuration of other distinctions; for example, it is sometimes unclear whether rap’t represents rapped or raped.)
• There was an inherited class of verbs which end in a dental and do not add a dental ending to show the past (e.g. cast, set). This class was temporarily enlarged by the borrowing of Latin participles ending in –t used initially as participles and past tenses, e.g. ‘Moste playnly those thynges sem to be euydent, whiche of offyce and good maner be gyue and precept of them’ (Robert Whittinton, 1534), ‘That the pain should be mitigate’ (1560). These were subsequently used in other forms of the verb and developed regular past forms in –ed.