Some peculiar forms of Old English verbs

Abstract

In late Old English it became common to find strange verb forms of which had less frequently appeared in earlier texts. It is clear that Old English paradigms started to modify their shapes, though their structure had never been completely established in the first place due to limited data. This article discusses some examples of Old English verbs which show a morphological merger in addition to phonetic, syntactic, or semantic resemblance, e.g., between wendan and gewendan, þyncan and þencan, læran and leornian, (ge)witan and (ge)wītan, blissian and bletsian, and biddan, (be)beodan, and forbeodan, so as to show the natural selection of Old English verbs in the process of lexical conflict.