Germanic Strong Verb - Class 7

Class 7

Class 7, Sweet's "fall conjugation", is not based on an Indo-European ablaut sequence as such; rather, it is the class showing reduplication in Gothic and irregular ablaut patterning in the other branches. It is generally believed that reduplication was once a feature of all Proto-Indo-European perfects, but it was lost in most verbs by Proto-Germanic times due to haplology. However, those verbs whose present and past stem did not differ in ablaut would not have had a marked distinction between present and past, so reduplication was originally retained in those verbs, which are the verbs categorized as class 7. Class 7 did not form a single unified class, but can be split into several subclasses based on the structure of the root. The first three were parallel with the first three classes: 7a was parallel to class 1, class 7b to class 2, and class 7c to class 3.

The following is a general picture of the Proto-Germanic situation as reconstructed by J. Jasanoff. Earlier reconstructions of the 7th class were generally based mostly on Gothic evidence.

The situation sketched above did not last. The later development of class 7 differs markedly between Gothic on one hand, and the Northwest Germanic languages on the other.