By Michael Ferber, Speaking of Words
People studying English as a second language—or its Germanic cousins such as German, Dutch, or Icelandic—must contend with a sizable list of irregular verbs. Most verbs, and nearly all new verbs, are regular: they make their past tense by adding a dental consonant sound, usually spelled –ed but pronounced in three different ways, to their basic (infinitive) or present tense form: they walk—they walked, they cringe—they cringed, they bat—they batted. That simple rule is easily learned and applied, but the other verbs are bewildering in their number and variety.
Most of the others are “strong verbs,” a term invented by Jacob Grimm, one of the famous Grimm brothers, for the very large number of them in German. Strong verbs make the past tense and past participle by changing the vowel in the stem of the verb twice, as in fly/flew/flown and write/wrote/written, or once, as in freeze/froze/frozen and fall/fell/fallen. The participle often ends in –n or -en. (We call it the “past” participle, but it should be called the perfect participle, as it is not bound to a tense.)
There are a few hybrid verbs, where for example, the vowel may change but the ending is still the dental consonant: sleep/slept/slept, feel/felt/felt. Or in a different mixture: swell/swelled/swollen.
The strong verbs have been sorted into seven major types across all the Germanic languages, but type 3 is the most regular of these irregular verbs, and the most fun. It includes sing/sang/sung, ring/rang/rung, and spring/sprang/sprung, but not bring/brang/brung. It includes drink/drank/drunk, sink/sank/sunk, stink/stank/stunk, and shrink/shrank/shrunk, but not think/thank/thunk. But then, who am I to expel bring and think from this happy family of verbs? I don’t say brang and brung, or thank and thunk, but millions of people have said brang and brung for some two thousand years, and thunk for at least a couple of centuries.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that the participle brungen is found in Old English, that is, over a thousand years ago, and in more recent dialects we find the past tense forms brang, brong, and brung, and the participle brung. But they have an even more distinguished ancestry. In the West Flanders dialect of modern Dutch we find bringen, brong, and gebrongen, while with Old High German bringan we find the singular past brang, the plural past brungun, and the participle brungan (this participle is still spoken in some regions of Germany). The common ancestor of these languages, Proto-West-Germanic, existed about two millennia ago.
The participle thunk is more of an upstart, as far as we can tell, not traceable much before 1800, and no past form thank has been discovered by the lexicographers, probably because it would have caused confusion with the verb to thank. Still, thunk has been around a while, and deserves some respect.
There are two others of this clan in standard English, swim/swam/swum and begin/began/begun, but there are another ten or so with credentials even better than brang and thunk. In standard English they fall into a pattern where the past is the same as the participle: wring/wrung/wrung, cling/clung/clung, fling/flung/flung, sting/stung/stung, string/strung/strung, swing/swung/swung, sling/slung/slung, slink/slunk/slunk, and spin/spun/spun. These make a distinctive set of their own, but for each of these verbs we can find (or the OED has found) a past tense in Old or Middle English like sang and rang: wrang, clang, flang, stang, strang, swang, slang, slank, and span. “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?” So said John Ball, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, in 1381.
I said the sing/sang/sung pattern is the most fun of the strong-verb types, and one reason it is fun is that it follows a pattern that seems built into our brains, that in a word compounded of two words differing only in their vowel, the word with the higher or more fronted vowel goes first, as in dingdong, ticktock (and TikTok), hiphop, flipflop, flimflam, mishmash, pitterpatter, shillyshally, teetertotter, and many more. (Some of these might want a hyphen between the parts.) There’s an old joke: “He’s so conservative his clock goes tock-tick.” This zigzag pattern has an extensive reach: bric-à-brac, a tisket a tasket, whipper-snapper, tic-tac-toe, dribs and drabs, tit for tat, and perhaps the threefold demonstrative pronoun set this, that, and yon. This vowel pattern is found in many languages. So perhaps the sing/sang/sung pattern has felt so natural or appropriate that it has drawn a few other verbs into its sphere of influence, though I must admit that few people other than schoolteachers and linguists have spent much time chanting verb forms.
This triple vowel shift, and many of the other strong-verb patterns, go way back, all the way to Proto-Indo-European five thousand years ago. It’s usually called Ablaut, another term we owe to Jacob Grimm, and occasionally “apophony.” It is found in nouns as well as verbs, but it is mainly the verb pattern that the Germanic languages inherited. Originally the vowel changes in the root or stem of a verb had to do with aspects rather than tenses. Dedicated readers of this column may remember when I tried to explain the difference between them (July 1, 2024). In the Greek verb leipo (“leave”), for instance, the imperfective or progressive form used the e-grade of the root (leipo “I am leaving”), the aorist or perfective form used the zero-grade (elipon “I left”), and the perfect used the o-grade (leloipa “I have left”). (Don’t worry about the prefixes.)
Something drastic happened to the Germanic branch after it parted from its cousins some four thousand years ago, or maybe later. The aspect-based verb system was completely repurposed into a tense-based system, and one result was that the o-grade perfects became the past tenses of most of the strong verbs. That is one reason that all English verbs, and all modern Germanic verbs, have only two tenses, present and past. If you want the future you must recruit another verb, an auxiliary such as will or shall or gonna. Having abandoned its aspects the Germanic family eventually made a new set that required more helping verbs: have for the perfect, be for the progressive (or imperfective). I will have been studying English for two years has three auxiliaries in a row, for the future perfect progressive of study.
One more interesting fact about the fun strong-verb pattern. As well as sing, sang, and sung there is a noun song, with another Ablaut origin. Are there other ong-nouns? Well, there is wrong (also an adjective), which is connected to wring. A wrong is something wrung, that is, twisted; in fact twisted became a common synonym for wrong among young people a few years ago, along with bent. And what about throng? Yup, there was once a verb thring, meaning “press, crowd, squeeze,” past tense thrang, participle thrung. A throng is something thrung.
So we should not be snooty about thrang and brang and the rest of the “substandard” set. We should invite them now and then to our family dinner table, maybe at Thunksgiving.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.