same value in the other Germanic dialects, ancient and modern. Moreover, there were other frequent changes of vowel in verbal conjugation, in other forms than these; the second and third persons singular present often differed from the first, and in a very large class of verbs the preterit plural differed from the singular. Thus, from helpan, 'to help', for example, we have ic helpe, 'I help'; he hylpth, 'he helpeth'; ic healp, 'I helped'; we hulpon, 'we helped'; and finally holpen, 'helped'—a fivefold play of vowel change. We, in our unconscious endeavour to utilize what was practically valuable in this condition of things, and to reject the rest from use, have retained and now admit, at most, a threefold variation, and have made it directly and independently significant, by casting away the needless terminations.
An interesting illustration of the way in which phonetic corruption sometimes creates a necessity for new forms, and leads to their production, is to be noted in connection with this subject. The Germanic preterits were originally formed by means of a reduplication, like the Greek and some of the Latin perfects;[1] but the variation of a radical vowel had, to no small extent, supplanted it, assuming its office and causing its disappearance in the great majority of ancient verbs. Its recognition as the sign of past meaning, and its application to the formation of preterits from new verbs, were thus broken up and rendered ineffective. At the same time, the change of vowel was too irregular and seemingly capricious to supply its place in such uses; there was no single analogy presented before the minds of the language-makers, which could be securely and intelligently followed. Hence, for all derivative and denominative verbs—additions by which every language is constantly enriching its stores of verbal expression—a new kind of past tense had to be formed, by composition with the old reduplicated preterit did, as has been already explained. This being soon converted into a suffix, and the number of preterits formed by means of it increasing greatly and rapidly, it became by degrees the more common indicator of past action, and was
