Exercises. 1. What is meant by the Perfect Tenses? 2. Classify the tenses. 3. Show that this classification is applicable to the progressive or continuous forms of the verb. 4. Name the tenses of the verbs in the following passages : a. There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O Earth, what changes hast thou seen!--Tennyson. b. He was speaking as I entered. c. Shall you go to see him? d. The gale had sighed itself to rest. e. I will listen to your song. f. Will you permit me to go? g. Shall you go yourself? h. He had learnt his lesson before he went to school. i. He leaves school next Christmas. k. We had been strolling on the moor when we met him. 7. He was come now to the gate. m. If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.—Bible. n. Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade Of that which once was great is passed away.- Wordsworth o. We shall have been waiting there an hour before the coach comes in. p. Ye shall see my face no more. q. He is working in the garden. Five times outlawed had he been By England's king and Scotia's queen. 5. What is meant by Number and Person in the case of verbs? 6. What parts of the verb have distinctive personal endings in modern English? 7. What was the origin of these endings? CONJUGATION. 76. To conjugate a verb is to arrange in order its various forms according to their mood, tense, person, and number. Verbs are classified for this purpose according to the way in which they form their past tense. Verbs that form their past tense by a change of the radical vowel are called Strong Verbs, e.g. Pres. Past. Perf. Part. written fallen drawn The perfect participle of these verbs formerly ended in -en. In some cases this ending is altered into -ne, as in done, gone; in others it is dropped altogether. Verbs that form their past tense by the addition of -d, -t, or -ed to the present are called Weak Verbs. The perfect participle of these verbs ends in -d or -t, e.g.— One of the most ancient modes of forming the past tense was by reduplication, the intention of the reduplication being apparently to give the impression that the action was thoroughly done. In Latin and Greek, reduplicated perfects are of common occurrence, but in English the only surviving examples of them are did, the past tense of do, and hight (originally héht) the past tense of hátan, to be called. A contraction of the reduplicated perfect probably led to a modification of the root-vowel. It is in this way that such perfects as feci in Latin are explained. The original perfect would appear to have been some such form as fefici, which would first contract into fe-ici, and then into feci. Coalescence of the root-vowel and the augmentvowel will not explain the vowel change in do, did, for here the consonant that once separated the two vowels has been retained. What happened in this case was clearly this, the root-vowel was dropped altogether and the augment-vowel was retained. The -d of the past tense of weak verbs represents the O.E. -de, which is a contraction of dede or dyde, the reduplicated past of do, so that I loved = I love-did; thou lovedst thou love-didst. As the past tense of weak verbs is formed by the addition of a suffix, which is itself the past of a strong verb, the strong verbs are to be regarded as the more ancient. All our primitive or root verbs belong to the strong class; all our derivative and borrowed verbs belong to the weak. The weak verbs are sometimes called regular, because they all form their past tense in the same way; but the name is objectionable, because it implies that the strong verbs are irregular, whereas they also follow laws, though the laws are not so obvious. Ben Jonson speaks of the class of weak verbs as 'the common inn to lodge every stranger and foreign guest.' G |