--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
> 'Class I weak' is pretty good evidence in itself. The overwhelming
> majority of OE weak verbs would have had infinitives in -jan (Class I)
> or -o:jan (Class II) (> OE infinitive -ian).
I quoted the Proto-Germanic infinitive forms! (Not everyone may have
realised that.) In OE, as a result of West Germanic consonant
gemination, the Class I infinitives ended in -an, except for stems in
-r, whose infinitives then ended -rian (e.g. _nerian_ 'save') and thus
are difficult (for late OE speakers, anyway) to distinguish from Class
II weak verbs.
Richard.