Historical preliminaries

Statistics by themselves don't mean very much; but here are some numbers that cast an interesting light on the development of the Germanic languages, in particular English. A typical Sanskrit verb paradigm may have as many as 126 distinct finite forms (that is, marked for tense/person/ number, excluding infinitives, participles, verbal nouns, etc.); the most complex Germanic system, Gothic, has twenty-two; Old English, somewhat more typically for Old Germanic, has a maximum of eight; ModE at its richest has three. While not all the Sanskrit forms represent original categories (at least eighteen, and possibly thirty-six, may be innovations), the general trend is clear: most of the ancient IE dialects have enormously complex verb systems compared to Germanic. Assuming these older types are closer to the IE original, the evolution of the Germanic verb involved a radical simplification (and as we will see, restructuring as well).

Just what the original IE verb system was like is a matter of considerable controversy, but we can safely reconstruct at least the following major inflectional categories:

(There is some debate about aspect/tense: it is at least possible that IE had an imperfect and pluperfect as well, and perhaps a future, though there is no agreement about this.)